


The End of Your Feral Days

by autopilot300



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Bad Sex, Blackmail, Blindfolds, Bondage, Captivity, Character Study, Choking, Coercion, Dark, Dark Past, Dark fic, Drugs, Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), Forced Orgasm, Forced Sex, Gen, Graphic Non-Con, Graphic Rape, Humiliation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Consensual, Non-Consensual Blow Jobs, Non-Consensual Drug Use, PTSD, Pansexual Poe Dameron, Past Rape/Non-con, Poe Dameron - Freeform, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Recovery, Sensory Deprivation, Stormpilot, Taken Prisoner, Torture, Trauma, Whump, drugged, forced drug taking, poe dameron spice runner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:20:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22451011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autopilot300/pseuds/autopilot300
Summary: Poe’s past comes back to haunt him when the Millennium Falcon is forced to make a stop on a moon where he’s a wanted man.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn, Poe Dameron/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 55
Kudos: 242





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please see tags for more specific warnings.

He really doesn’t know how he’s going to explain this to Finn and Rey. That’s the biggest problem on his mind, before he allows himself to figure out that he really has bigger problems. He stands to lose a lot more than just their good opinion of him, and yet right now, their good opinion seems to be the cornerstone of everything he’s worth. 

_So, you know I ran spice._

They do know that. And them knowing that, it turned out, was not the hardest part. It’s the part that looks worst on paper, but they don’t know the half. He is the son of rebel heroes, raised with love. He ran spice, right in the teeth of the law, made somebody (though not himself) a whole heap of cash off the miserable blight of addiction.

 _Stormtrooper. Scavenger._ But he is not like Finn or Rey. Their choices, their childhoods, were stolen from them. His, he threw away like it was nothing of worth. That’s the part they won’t understand, not the hard luck or the hurt, but how he ended up there. How sometimes, everything seems stacked up in your favour, and you still fuck up. That sometimes, you fuck up because you’re a fuck-up. You fuck up because of _you._

_I told myself that spice addicts chose that life. I told myself that, and I took the job because I didn’t know how to live if I couldn’t fly. And I just couldn’t fly enough, I could never fly fast enough. If Zorii knew how many times I was careless on purpose because I wanted to get chased…_

So, yeah, by the time he did get caught, he had really built a debt against fate. He was lucky it was just that one time, and that he got away like he did. No one had a good opinion of him that he had to risk losing. He’d been unburdened of good opinions of himself ever since the little fuck-up that saw him fired from the New Republic Navy. Insubordination, reckless behaviour, and then a downward spiral of disastrous decisions that ended with a hold full of spice. 

_One time, I was flying empty, on the way home, and I stopped over on Pallas, this little mining moon. I went to a bar, and I met a woman, and she bought me a drink. She introduced me to her husband, and he bought me a drink. I went back with them to their place, and I went down on her and fucked her, and then I sucked his dick, and he sucked my dick, and we fell asleep, three to the bed._

Not the way he’d tell it to Rey and Finn. But that’s the way that it went, and he’d left the next morning in time to see the sun up on his walk back to the shuttleport. Feeling pretty good about it, even, until he climbed into his bird, and found her launch sequence jammed. 

_So, uh, long story short, turned out that husband was the Pallas chief of law enforcement, and what’s more, he knew exactly who I was. And on Pallas, they aren’t very kind to spice runners. They have deep dark mines, and that’s where prisoners go. Forget flying. I was fucked. He told me that, in no uncertain terms. I thought I’d never get to see another sunrise._

But then, he offered Poe a way out. Chief Enforcer Jeyden Hood, who’d seemed so easy-going, lounging on his barstool. Who tasted like the local kayafruit liquor. Who had told Poe the reason he lived in such a nice house was because he worked in shipments. Who had asked Poe the night before if he liked to get fucked, and had only seemed a little bit put out when Poe had said no, not really. 

_Except it turned out he was a lot put out. Which meant, one way or another, I was getting fucked._

Yeah, that’s definitely not how he’d tell Finn or Rey. If he ever does. If he ever gets to. If it’s even that big of a deal. People get fucked all the time, in all sorts of ways, and it was his own stupid fault. He has no intention of dwelling too closely on that particular flavour of painful humiliation. It makes him feel odd inside. Makes him conscious of his body, and the way he moves. Made the walk back to his bird, the second time, the longest walk he’d taken in his life. 

_I loved that bird. She wasn’t much, didn’t fly like an X-wing, but she was all mine. I named her after Yavin’s pole star. I think I hoped she’d carry me home. A year or so after Pallas, I ditched her in the sea on Candor 5, her hold still full of spice, and I ran away to join the Resistance._

Where all he had to offer was his family name, and the fact that he could fly like a demon, if they’d put him in an X-wing. And it turned out, that was enough. The long road back to becoming his mother’s son, to sleeping at night, to falling in love three times, with Leia, Finn and Rey, and to burdening himself once more with other people’s good opinions. 

_So, you know I ran spice…_

How the fuck is he going to explain this? Why can’t his past just stay wrecked at the bottom of the sea? Pallas is a nowhere moon, its only city small, most of its infrastructure underground. He never would have dreamed in a million years that he would end up coming back here. 

Even when the Falcon blew out a converter, and they needed to land at the first port they reached that would have them, Poe didn’t think of Pallas. If he had been flying, he would have taken them right past without a glance. But Rey was in the pilot’s chair, and when she said _Pallas_ , something in Poe seemed to jam like a bad piece of mechanism. His tongue was tied in knots. He couldn’t think. They had touched down (roughly, engines screaming) before he even found the words to speak.

“Uh. So, I had some trouble on Pallas once.” It came out weird, judging by the way Rey and Finn both turned to look at him.

“What kind of trouble?” Finn asked. Through the viewscreen, Poe could see the lights of the city beyond the shuttleport.

“You know, the usual kind,” he said. Finn looked at him for a long hard second. 

“We’ll all be having some trouble here if we don’t get this converter fixed,” Rey said, and she wasn’t wrong.

“Bad trouble?” Finn asked him.

“Not the worst.” Which, in retrospect, counted among the stupider things that Poe had ever said. But really, what were the chances? Who’d recognise him now, or care if they did? It was a comforting thought, which lasted a whole five minutes before port security came to find out their business, and an enforcer droid took one look at his face and started chirruping alarms. 

Kind of embarrassing, really. He looked over his shoulder, and gave an apologetic shrug as they marched him off. 

“Wait for me,” he told them. “I can fix this.” Which was also pretty dumb, but he was really on a streak by then, so why quit? The look on Finn’s face stayed with him, though. Concern, of course, but also he looked pissed, which Poe assumed was aimed at himself. 

_Don’t blame you, buddy. Welcome to my life._ It stung, though. Finn looks at him sometimes in a whole other way; like Poe is a hero, like he’s worth a million credits, like he can do any damn thing he puts his mind to. Poe could fly to the sun on that look alone. 

So, yeah. He has bigger problems than the old familiar ache of being disappointing to the people he loves. But anything else, he can live with. Even dying in a hole in the ground. 

That there might be another option, like there was last time, is a thought he keeps carefully at arm’s length. Even unexamined, it makes his stomach want to disappear. Makes his legs not quite work as he is hustled by guards, his hands cuffed behind him, through a door to a passageway which descends into the ground. He takes a last look at the sun, which is setting like a spill of ink. _Write ‘Wait for me. I can fix this’ on my tombstone, guys._

“Hey,” he says, to Jeyden Hood, who actually looks pissed at him too. 

_So, you know I ran spice…_


	2. Chapter 2

So, Poe finds himself standing in Jeyden Hood’s underground office, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Hood really does look pissed, like Poe’s return is stupid enough to be actively insulting to him. The guards leave them alone. Poe puts himself at a kind of attention, back straight, legs shoulder-width apart, eyes fixed on the wall just over Hood’s head. The mix of discipline and defiance that’s the heritage of his New Republic Navy days.

“I can’t believe you came back,” Hood says. Poe can’t really disagree, so he says nothing. He has fought hard to reconceptualise what happened last time on Pallas as just another one night stand, of the type that transforms into a bad idea by the cold light of day. He had, after all, consented to sex with the man just the night before. Hell, he might even have consented to be fucked, if Hood had really pushed for it, or bought him another drink or three. 

Except now, it all unravels. The lies he told himself, the bitter tang of shame upon his tongue. The creeping sense across his skin that stayed with him for days. The fact that, if he’s honest, he’s never felt quite right being naked with another person since. He feels like he’s somewhere outside himself, observing. Out of proper control of how he might react if Hood tries to touch him again. He tries to pretend that he’s flying, because he never panics in the cockpit, no matter how close to the wire he gets. He flexes his fingers gently, pretending he’s gripping the controls. Imagines he hears the hum of engines, changing tune at his lightest touch. It helps. He looks Hood in the eye.

“Hey,” Poe says. “Do you remember that time I fucked your wife?”

Hood hits him round the head, fast and hard. Poe has no time to duck, and staggers to keep his balance with his arms behind his back. His ears ring, but he feels a heady, if cheap, kind of triumph. He is maybe not so powerless as he thought.

“Didn’t we talk before, about what we do to spice runners on Pallas?”

“I don’t do that any more,” Poe says. Hood gives a shrug.

“There’s no statute of limitations. You can tell it to the judge, but she won’t care. We don’t like your kind around here.”

“I’m not too keen on your kind, if it comes to that.”

“I guess you’re not.” Hood smiles, a little distantly, like he’s keeping a joke to himself. It makes Poe remember that on their first meet, he found this guy attractive. Funny. Good looking. Easy going. His kind of guy. _Well, that goes to show you don’t know shit._

“So, what happens next?” Poe asks. A question that will probably invite trouble, but he’s rapidly running out of the cool required to just stand here and wait. Hood makes him, though. Just stands there, leaning on his desk, looking Poe up and down like he can’t decide if he likes what he sees. 

“Who are your friends?” he asks, abruptly. “Back on that wreck you call a ship?”

“I don’t know them,” Poe says. “I was hitching a ride.” 

“That’s funny, because they haven’t left without you.”

“Well, you know, I’m pretty easy to love.” 

“I do remember that,” Hood says. His mouth twists in a smile without any warmth. Poe lets his eyes flick away, and swallows, which Hood doesn’t miss.

“Maybe I should get them down here too. Bagging a whole ship full of spice runners is going to look really good for me.” 

This is a fresh danger. Poe straightens his shoulders, which were starting to droop, and fixes Hood in the eye.

“They’re nothing to do with this. Nothing. Whatever we’re doing here. Whatever you want. You’re getting nothing from me unless you leave them out.” 

“I’m getting something from you?” Hood sounds amused. “What, you think this is going to go like it did last time?”

Poe shrugs. Puts every ounce of his strength into acting like he doesn’t much care.

“You’re not exactly in a bargaining place,” Hood says. “You’re already wearing the cuffs. If I want to fuck you, I can take what I want. You understand that, right?” 

“Then why are we still talking?” 

Hood pushes himself up from his lean, and Poe has to stop himself from flinching, because he half expects another smack round the head. It’s even harder to hold still when Hood moves towards him, and into his personal space. He slides an arm around Poe’s waist so it settles on the small of his back, just beneath his cuffed hands. Poe does not move at all, doesn’t flick his eyes, doesn’t even dare swallow, even as saliva pools in the back of his throat. 

“So, why did you come back?” Hood asks in his ear. “Are you really that dumb? Or did you miss my big dick?”

Poe lets himself laugh through his nose, and hopes it sound derisive instead of on the brink of freaking out. Having Hood right in his face is making the skin on his balls crawl. He wants very much to cover the front of his body. He wants to deal Hood a vicious headbutt. He wants to go home, back to the Resistance base, or his real home on Yavin 4. He wants to recede right back in time to when his mother was alive, and he had never been touched by anyone who meant to do him harm. The passing of time suddenly steals his breath away, and he is struck by grief. The loss of his mother, the first and deepest hurt of his life.

“You’re Resistance,” Hood says. Poe blinks, back to the present. The very words give him strength. He doesn’t answer, but he meets Hood’s look, fixes it, holds it. Reminds himself that since his last time on Pallas, he has gone from being a wanted man to a man who is wanted. It is not just for himself that he needs to get through this, any way he can. 

“We got a bulletin about you,” Hood says. “Wanted by the First Order. Resistance fugitive. You know, it took me a minute or two to place you. Then I thought, Poe Dameron. Oh, right. I fucked that guy.” 

“Oh, right,” Poe echoes. He echoes Hood’s smile too, wolf-like, with all his teeth showing. “I’d forgotten too. You weren’t very memorable yourself.”

“Big talk,” Hood says. He presses his mouth right up against Poe’s face so Poe can feel the touch of each word. “I’m going to fuck you raw. You’ll think of me for the rest of your life. You enjoy being an asshole while you can, Resistance hero. To me, you’re the same old spice-running, bar-hopping fuckboy, good for only one thing.” 

“So, what do you want, Hood? You want me to ask for it? Because I won’t. Like you said, you can take what you want. You want to fuck me, go ahead.” 

He’s freefalling, risking pissing Hood off beyond the point of no return, but right now all he wants is to keep Hood’s attention away from Finn and Rey. Besides, he’d rather feel the flare of anger than to let himself succumb to the dragging weight of helplessness, fear and shame. 

_Watch it, though. You push him too far, he’ll snap. Then everyone gets hurt._

So he says nothing else, holds his anger inside him like a secret, holds still, even as Hood brings his free hand to rest on the fastening of Poe’s pants. Even as he tucks his fingers down inside Poe’s waistband, inside his underwear, and brushes through the dense, curly hair he finds down there. The top of his thumb brushes against Poe’s cock. Suddenly, Hood’s whole hand is inside, grasping hold of him by the root, squeezing his shaft, fumbling down to find his balls and grind them in the palm of his hand. Poe holds still. Mentally tries to uncouple that part of his body. It is not him.

“You know, this is kind of boring,” he manages to say, after a minute or two. His voice even sounds half normal, coming as it does through gritted teeth. Hood keeps on tugging at him. 

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” he says in Poe’s ear. “I can hold you without charge for twelve hours. After that - well, I’m no friend to the First Order. Though I’ve got to say, I despair at what the Resistance has come to, if you’re one of their leading men." 

“You’re not the first to say so,” Poe says, trying to keep the wince from his voice as Hood pinches the top of his balls between finger and thumb. 

“But I would send you to the mines. Your friends too. It's nothing to me, so don't ever think I won't do it. So, it's up to you. You tell me what happens next. I’m going to fuck you either way, and I don’t much care if you fight me, so you don’t have much on the table right now.” 

_Except right now, I’m standing here letting you rearrange my downstairs furniture, and you seem to like that._

“I guess,” Poe says, then stops and shuts his eyes, because this is the very thing he just said he wouldn’t do. “I guess things could go a little different, if I didn’t fight. So long as this stays between us. You keep those enforcer droids away from that ship. Let them wait, or leave if they want to.” 

Hood is silent for a moment, still pulling away at Poe’s cock. Then he says, “Maybe you could start by saying you came back because you missed my big dick.”

“I came back -” Poe says, but he really can’t do it. “I came back because I really am just this dumb.” 

Abruptly, Hood pulls his hand from Poe’s pants, and before Poe can think, Hood punches him hard in the side of the head. He has no chance of holding himself upright, and instead falls sideways onto his knees. 

“Then let’s try this.” Hood drops a hand onto the top of Poe’s head, and with the other, fumbles at his pants and pulls his own cock out. A cock, Poe reminds himself, that he has already sucked once before, with cheerful consent. It is large, which once somewhat impressed him. The shaft of it curves, and it seems like some blind, eyeless creature, reaching towards him. 

“Do we have a deal?” Poe has to ask, looking up at Hood instead of at the thing in his face. “I’m not doing this unless you say we have a deal.” 

“How about you do this, and then I’ll say if we have a deal.”

Poe tries to duck his head away, and struggles briefly against his cuffs, but it’s a token protest. There is no choice that he can see. He has had no choice since the moment they clasped him in cuffs. Hood takes a handful of Poe’s hair and grasps his cock by the base.

“Open your mouth,” he says. Poe doesn’t even really, but he does unclench his teeth, and it’s enough for Hood to push his way inside. The head of his cock sits heavy on Poe’s tongue, tasting of salt and skin, and slightly of urine and sweat. Hood does not stop there, but thrusts in hard, way past the point of comfort, and Poe has to swallow hard so he doesn’t gag. It bumps against the back of his throat and he swallows and swallows again. He tries to breathe through his nose, fails, and retches as saliva falls back into his lungs. Still Hood holds him in place, with both hands twisted in his hair. Poe swallows again, painfully. His chest heaves. He gags, uselessly. Tries as hard as he can to ride it out, breathe through it, but it does no good – he is absolutely, definitely, either going to choke or throw up. 

Then Hood pulls his hips back, stopping when the head of his cock is sitting just past Poe’s lips. Poe fights like fury to rid his mouth of those last few inches. At first Hood just laughs, and holds him in place, but he finally relents and lets his cock slide right out. It stays there, bobbing in front of Poe’s face while he coughs and heaves. Finally, the heaving fades to wheezing, and Poe is left panting on his knees. 

“Well, that wasn’t great,” Hood said.

“Not for me either,” Poe says, when he can, because much as Hood might get off on his protests, he is damned if he’s going to pretend this is anything but awful from his end. Hood grasps himself and makes to push forward again. Poe wrenches his head back, painfully. 

“C’mon,” he says. “Give me a chance this time.” He hates himself for saying it, but he can’t take twelve hours of this. Hood seems not to listen at first as he barges his cock past Poe’s lips again, but he does stop short of hitting him right in the gag reflex. Poe closes his eyes. It is very important he doesn’t think too hard about what he is doing. It is just some mechanical task that he needs to achieve. Luckily, he has some muscle memory to draw on. He sucks a little at first, to work up some spit and smooth things out, but Hood quickly gets impatient, and starts to rock his hips. He slides the head of his cock back and forth across Poe’s tongue. All Poe can do is concentrate on keeping his teeth clear and breathing through his nose. His jaw quickly starts to ache, but it works okay, until Hood starts pushing in too deep. 

Poe gags again, and Hood pulls out to let him hawk up a wad of spit that went down the wrong way. This time, he gets no time to catch his breath before Hood forces his way back in and Poe’s mouth is full again. His throat works against the intrusion in a miserable, unfulfilled cough. His eyes and nose are streaming. His jaw is killing him, and his teeth keep drifting together and bumping against the shaft, which earns him a yank on his hair. 

At last, Hood’s hips shudder, and he presses the tip of his cock hard against Poe’s tongue. Taste floods Poe’s mouth, salty and thick, coming in spurts. Hood finally lets go of his hair, and pulls back, panting. His spent cock starts to droop downwards. Poe, nearly dizzy with relief, turns his head to the side and spits, as hard as he can. His mouthful of cum arcs through the air and hits the floor with an audible _splut._

Hood clouts him round the side of the head, and sends him sprawling. Poe lands awkwardly and stays down, his head ringing, panting hard. His shoulders, pulled backwards by the cuffs, hurt like fire. More than anything else, he wants to wipe his face. His chin is wet and his nose is running. He cannot speak, and isn’t sure what he’d say if he could, but he makes a kind of _uff_ sound when Hood looms over him again. Hood jams the toe of his boot hard into Poe’s ribs.

“That wasn’t the deal. Who said you could spit?” He grabs Poe by the hair and hauls him painfully off the ground. Poe draws a ragged breath, and on the exhale manages to say, “Well, you didn’t say not – ” but then Hood lets him go, and he face-plants back on the floor. The wad of spunk he disposed of before is inches from his face. He starts to roll away, but suddenly Hood’s foot is on his neck.

“You want a deal, spice runner? You swallow. Suck it up.”

“Fuck your deal,” Poe snarls back, but he doesn’t mean it. It hardly matters what he says; this is always going to end the same way. Hood uses his boot to grind his face against the floor. Poe tries to twist himself away, but he has no leverage, and he has to relent before Hood takes his refusal to heart. “Okay, okay. I’ll do it, you sick fuck.” 

The boot lifts. Poe rolls and tucks his knees back under himself. Hood drops his foot back between Poe’s shoulder blades to stop him from straightening up. Poe has to shuffle, his face inches off the floor, to reach the sticky wad of stuff. He closes his eyes and sticks his tongue out. Licks it up, and a good bit of grime from the floor along with it. He tries to swallow before he can taste it, gets it all down with a big painful gulp. He manages not to retch by pure force of will. 

Hood takes his foot off Poe’s back. Poe flops onto his side, and lets his eyes fall closed. Tells himself he is saving his strength. He feels spent. His insides are a turmoil. He’s still not convinced he's not going to throw up. He can hear Hood’s feet scraping as he moves about the room. Hears a communicator beep, and Hood call for the guards. He keeps his eyes closed as the door opens, and new footsteps enter the room. 

“New prisoner,” Hood says. “Take him to cell twelve. Strip him and wire him up.” 

That doesn’t sound good. Sounds, in fact, like something he ought to be urgently concerned about, but Poe has the strange sensation that he’s not wholly in the room. Still, he can’t help an audible groan as the guards grab him and pull him up, mostly because his shoulders feel twisted beyond repair. He doesn’t resist, but he doesn’t help either, and as a result, he nearly falls straight back down before the guards get him propped on his feet. 

He looks back over his shoulder at Hood as they haul him out the room, then wishes he hadn’t, because it makes him think of Finn. His friends seem lightyears away, and for all their sakes, he hopes they stay there. Still, he hasn't felt this alone in a long while, and he'd forgotten the desperate ache of it, of living a life where nothing really matters, not even yourself. 

Hood smiles at his look, and tips him a wave. “I’ll be down to see you soon, spice runner.”

On second thoughts, maybe he could stand to be a little more alone.


	3. Chapter 3

Poe finds himself being propelled down a dimly lit passage cut into the rock. It slopes downwards, steeply in places, and he trips and stumbles, his arms still pinned behind his back, entirely reliant on the guards to stop him from falling. They do so with bad grace. After what feels like a very long way down, they reach a heavy door which stands half open, and Poe is shoved through. 

He finds himself in a dingy rock room furnished with a shabby wire-framed bed and a bucket in the corner. He can’t help but compare it to the time he was a guest in Hood’s house, which was large and airy, with new furniture and wide city views. If he’s honest, he’s not entirely a fan of small, dark spaces. He thrives at high altitude, in heady upper atmospheres, or the vastness of space. Down here, the air is still and stale and tastes like a tomb. 

Poe is pushed to the middle of the room. One guard unclinches his cuffs and pulls them clear of his wrists, and he takes a blessed moment to shrug the cramps from his shoulders. The other guard moves in front of him, and starts fumbling at the buttons of his shirt. Poe steps backwards and stands on the foot of the man behind him, which earns him a shove between the shoulder blades. He bumps into the guard in front, and for a moment, the two of them are just shoving him back and forth between them. 

“Hey, do you mind?” Poe says. They stop, and both look at him strangely, like they’re not used to the people they shove talking back. Poe raises an incredulous eyebrow at them, unbuttons his own shirt, and hands it to the one closest to him. 

“Naked?” he asks them, and gets the same strange look before the one holding his shirt nods. It’s clear they don’t quite know what to make of him, and he wonders what they know of his history, or of Hood’s intentions with him. He bends to unlace his boots, and kicks them off. Straightens up, unfastens his pants, and pauses a moment with his thumbs on the waistband.

“All the way naked?” 

The guards’ eyes harden, and they make to move towards him. Poe hastily pulls his pants and underwear down in one motion, and steps out of them. It doesn’t feel great, but it beats being forcibly stripped. He tries to affect nonchalance, like standing around buck naked in front of two strange men is just something he does every weekend. At least it isn’t cold. 

One guard takes him by the wrists, and the other produces a new pair of cuffs. These ones are made of thin strands of wire which wrap twice around each wrist. Once secured, his hands are raised above his head and fastened to a fixture in the roof. It is just slightly too high for him, forcing him to stretch. The guards are still hanging around like spare parts, looking at him like he’s some vaguely unsettling specimen they’ve seen at an alien zoo. 

“You fellas having a good day?” Poe asks. One of them is frowning at him. Frowning, Poe realises, at the chain he is still wearing around his neck, the one he didn’t take off because he never takes it off. He has worn it without fail his whole adult life, ever since he left home. The guard reaches for it.

“Get the fuck off,” Poe warns him, and when that doesn’t work, he kicks out. A useless kick which glances right off the guard’s knee. Poe is thrown off balance, unable to support himself on one leg, his whole weight thrown into his wire restraints. The guard takes hold of his chain and yanks it loose before Poe can get his legs back underneath him. As soon as he is back on his feet, the guard punches him hard in the gut. 

“Fuck,” Poe wheezes. “You fuck. You’d better not lose that.” He fights to find his feet again. The wire has bitten right into his wrists, and beads of something wet are running down his forearms. The guard dangles the ring on its chain right in front of his face. 

_That belonged to my mother, you piece of shit._ At least he only says it to himself this time, berating himself as he does so. Is there some pathological reason why he can’t keep his mouth shut? _You’ll lose that ring now, and all because you had to let them know exactly how much that would hurt you._

He gets his feet back under him and tries to get a hold on himself. The guard lets the ring turn in the light, and then with a snort, he turns and throws it in the bucket. Poe hears a discordant chime as it hits the bottom. He tears his eyes away from it, trying – far too late – to pretend that he hasn’t noted with every ounce of his attention exactly where it fell. 

He really is naked now. The skin on his neck where the chain once sat tingles with the touch of air. At least from the sound, he thinks – he hopes – the bucket was empty. The guards leave him, and he shifts his weight around, trying to find the most comfortable way to stand. The muscles in his back are overextended, and already starting to ache. He has to hold his own arms aloft, because putting any weight on the restraints makes them dig into his wrists. As the minutes pass, his shoulders start to ache, then shake. 

Still, he can’t stop thinking about his mother’s ring. Rehearsing over and over in his mind the act of retrieving it, as soon as he has the chance. Like he thinks he’s going to forget it if he thinks about anything else. _Twelve hours,_ he tells himself. _You’ve got twelve hours of this, and you’re not going to make it if you keep on losing your shit. Just take it. Whatever they do. Whatever Hood does. Just take it, then it’ll be done._

People tell him he is like his mother. Surviving veterans of the first rebellion, who knew her longer and better than he did. Poe is never as pleased as he pretends to be, because he’s conscious that he loses something more of her with every passing year, some sharpness and colour to his recollection. He is afraid that in time, other people’s memories will overwrite his own. That one day, all he’ll have is second-hand stories; the touch of her, the smell of her, entirely lost to time. 

Besides, he’s pretty sure that he’s actually nothing like her. For starters, there’s no way in hell that she was such a spectacular dumbass. 

He gives himself a little jerk around the wrists to stop himself from being maudlin. He thinks of Finn for a while instead, but gets stuck again in the endless loop of how the hell he’s ever going to explain this mess to his friends. If he ever gets the chance to. If Hood even has any intention of upholding his end of the deal and letting Poe go when he’s done. 

The shake that started in his shoulders is spreading down his body, into the muscles of his back. His arms are drooping, and he has to let his wrists rest against the wires, lifting them only when the bite of pain gets too much to bear. His eyes sting with sweat, and his mouth still tastes vile. _Hey guys, sorry I’m late, I’ve just been licking spunk up off the floor._

It is almost a relief when Hood comes in, though it does drive home to Poe how utterly and completely exposed he is. He is not, as a rule, self-conscious about his body, but under Hood’s appraising eye, he suddenly feels made of imperfections.

“How’s it going?” Poe asks, since apparently he just can’t shut up. It does help, though. If all he can do is run his mouth, he might as well. 

“I’m good,” Hood sounds genuinely amused. “Are you good?”

“Yeah, I’m really good. Feeling great about my life right now.” 

“Good.” Hood has brought a small canvas bag in with him. He takes something out of it, something small which sits within his palm, then places the bag on the floor by the bed. He opens his hand to show Poe. “Know what that is?”

It’s a small, white pill. Beyond that, Poe doesn’t know. “Happy pill?” he guesses at random.

“Of a kind. This is going to keep me hard all night. Don’t judge me. It’s just I’m not as young as I was, and I want to make the most of our time together.”

“That’s sweet.” Poe keeps his voice light, but looks away. He feels kind of sick, now it actually comes down to it. He keeps his eyes averted while Hood gets himself undressed, folding each item of clothing carefully, making a neat pile on the floor. Poe’s own clothes are still kicked around the room. _Just get through it. Keep your mouth shut if you can. Or don’t. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. What can he do to you, really? Nothing you haven’t done before. It’s just sex._

Except it isn’t sex. It’s nothing like sex. Sex is fun, and warm fuzzy feelings, and the mutually negotiated rubbing together of body parts. Poe keeps his face turned away as Hood stands before him naked. Looks anywhere but at him as Hood moves in close to his body, skin touching skin. The curve of his belly presses against Poe’s. His dick, beneath that, already hard and nudging. Hood lays his face into the hollow of Poe’s neck and pulls their bodies together. Poe, without meaning to, lets his breath out in a sigh. He could endure an act of violence, but this stolen intimacy is the worst. Being naked together, skin on skin, like they are lovers, like Hood has a right to his body. Like he’s not being robbed. 

Hood moves around behind him and wraps his arms around Poe’s waist. His cock presses against Poe’s buttocks, the tip of it touching the small of his back. Hood’s embrace adds to the weight against Poe’s wrists, making the wires bite fresh wounds. Poe finds himself leaning slightly backwards, letting Hood take some of his weight, to try and ease it. Blood is oozing itchily down his forearms, mingling with beads of sweat. Hood starts to stroke Poe’s cock again, the tips of his rough fingers catching on the smooth, velvet skin. He slides Poe’s foreskin back and forth. Finds his balls again, and grinds them in his palms. 

Another problem. Under Hood’s ministrations, Poe’s dick is – well, not getting hard, or even half hard, but there’s definitely something going on. A bit of a stir. Hood feels it too, and his fondling shifts from idle to intentional, dragging his hand up and down Poe’s shaft with a constant pressure. _Yup, that’ll do it._ Poe bites his lip. He leans his weight deliberately into his wrists, finding an angle which makes the wire bite where the skin is already raw. Lances of pain shoot all the way down his forearms, but it’s enough to convince his cock that now is not the time. He shrinks in Hood’s hand, and after a bit of further fumbling, Hood gives up. 

He reaches and unhooks Poe’s restraints from the fixture in the roof. Once released, Poe’s legs suddenly won’t hold him. His knees fold up and he flops forward. Hood lets him fall, and he lands roughly, his weight on his hands, which are still attached to each other. He can’t help a groan of relief, on behalf of every muscle in his body. He wants to stay on the floor, and fold himself up in something like the foetal position, but Hood drops a hand on his shoulder.

“Up,” Hood says, and half guides, half pushes Poe onto the bed, which consists of a thin mattress over a wire frame, and not much else. It looks none too clean, and feels damp against Poe’s skin when Hood sits him on it. Poe lets himself be pushed into position, flat on his back. Hood lifts his hands and secures them to the bed frame, up above Poe’s head. The wires still sit against his wrists, but without his weight against them, it doesn’t hurt too much. If nothing else, he is at least a great deal more comfortable. Bright sides. Poe settles his head back between his pinioned arms. He suddenly feels short of breath, because he knows what’s coming next.

Hood seems in no hurry, though. He climbs onto the bed, spreads Poe’s legs apart, and settles himself between them. His hands go exploring, stroking over Poe’s stomach, burrowing his fingers through the dense hair between Poe’s legs. Brushing over Poe’s cock, tracing around the pinch of loose flesh at the base of his balls. Travelling down across his perineum. Poe twitches at his touch. All but stops breathing as Hood’s thumb presses briefly on his asshole, but Hood’s hands keep on roaming. It’s like he means to draw a map from memory, to reproduce Poe’s private parts with perfect topography. 

“How does it feel?” Hood asks him. 

“Really bad, thanks for asking.” Poe’s heart is thumping like he’s just run up a hill, and his breath keeps coming up short. It’s all he can do not to yell at Hood just to get on with it. 

“You know, I still can’t believe you’re Resistance,” Hood says, like they’re just chatting at the bar. “They really must be desperate. What do you do for them, when you’re not sucking dick?”

“Mostly just that.” He can’t really struggle, but nor can he keep still. He shifts his legs around until Hood catches him by the ankles, and holds him in place, his feet flat against the bed and his knees bent.

“Oh, so you’re a pro.” Hood reaches down to the bag beside the bed, and pulls out a bottle. He shows it to Poe, then shakes it up. “Let’s see how you do at being ridden like a bitch.” 

Poe realises he’s been thinking so hard about preparing that he’s forgotten to actually prepare. _Just breathe_ , he tells himself, even as his throat closes. Hood cracks open the bottle of lube, smears a little on the head of his cock, and then presses a wet, cold finger against Poe’s ass. Poe braces himself for intrusion, but Hood only rubs over the entrance, then withdraws. He pushes Poe’s legs backwards, folding them back against his chest. His cock bumps against the base of Poe’s thigh, leaving a sticky touch of lube to dry in the air.

At first, there is just pushing, and stickiness getting into places where it does no good. Hood’s cock stabs at a spot that won’t give, and the lube is just making him slide off target. He slips a hand down there, and leans hard into Poe’s thighs, forcing his legs wider open. Between that and the lube, his body starts to give. 

“Relax,” Hood grunts at him, but Poe couldn’t if he tried. Every muscle below his waist has put itself on lock down, and his stomach is clamped hard as a board. The head of Hood’s cock pushes inside him, pressing on nerves he barely knew he had. It is a whole-body pain that fills his belly and flows up his spine. A pain he knows, but had not remembered until now, that is part sensation, and part pure bodily protest at the _wrongness_ of it; that things are not meant to go up that way, at least not without a great deal of prior negotiation. 

He hates himself for doing it, but he has to tilt his pelvis to find an angle which hurts less, and that’s just the help Hood needs to slide in deeper. Despite the lube, it drags, and Hood seems to feel it too, twisting his face up as each push of his hips give him deeper purchase. If Poe ever thought he might be able to stay stoically silent, that thought is long gone. His every exhale comes out as a pained noise. It would take more strength than he has to shut himself up, and he’s not going to do that for Hood, who has already taken his body. He hates this and it hurts, and letting it show is the only small part of himself he has left. 

The outcome of this thought process is that he gets pretty loud. Hood grunts at him too, in rhythm with his slapping thighs. More and more of his weight falls against Poe’s legs, until Poe’s knees are nearly back at his shoulders, his hips tilted to up the sky. His asshole is utterly at the mercy of Hood’s cock, sliding in and out to its full length. Hood’s face is in his line of sight, which is awkward as fuck. Poe closes his eyes, but this triggers a laser-point focus of all his senses on the physical sensation of getting fucked. He has to escape, and his eyes pop open like a swimmer breaking the surface. 

“How do you like it, spice runner? I’m in you balls deep.” Hood is right above him, grinning like a wolf. Poe swears in his face, at first in a spitting fury, then as that burns out to a blunted exhaustion, he simply persists, reeling out every term of abuse he can think of, using the act of speech to keep himself breathing, to push the air out of his lungs with the rhythm of life. Hood laughs at him at first, but maybe something Poe says stings him a little, because he starts pounding hard, and then it’s a whole new timbre of pain, blunt and bruising, their thighs slapping together, sticking with sweat, then peeling apart, over and over. 

At last, Poe is spent, and shuts the fuck up. He feels numb, and his eyes roll shut. He feels, finally, like he’s somewhat less present. Like he could let himself drift, be carried away on the shifting tides of some distant sea. Like when he crashed his poor bird, heavy with spice, in the sea on Candor 5. He was being chased; he had to ditch, and hope they’d assume he went down with his ship. Which he did. Hit and miss for a while if he’d make it to the surface. Salt taste. Water weight. 

“Hey. Hey!” There is a hand around his throat. It’s been there already for a minute or two, but the thumb is new, pressing hard into the hollow of his neck. It’s enough to bring Poe back to the room, although he still feels the pull of the tide. Everything here is the same as it ever was. He still hates everything in his field of vision. Hood’s cock is still lodged inside him, every thrust of it a discordant pressure-pain that drags a groan from his throat. 

Until Hood’s hand tightens in a choke hold. No more groans. No nothing. No air in his lungs, and his airway closed. Poe comes back to full vivid consciousness with a jerk, and starts to fight for all he’s worth. He succeeds in moving his body, all in all, about an inch. Gets one leg free from the press of Hood’s weight but finds nothing to kick. The strength drains out of him, spiralling out like a pulled plug. His vision greys, and he’s dimly aware that his body slumps, relaxed and weightless, and that the pain has gone somewhere else. It’s not so bad. 

Then Hood opens his hand, and Poe’s chest spasms, dragging in air. He gasps, and his back arches. His whole body is a straining knot of muscles, fighting to escape. He twists, miserably, but he’s still impaled, held in place by the cock in his ass and the weight of the man behind it. He wonders for the first time if he might not survive this. That his inglorious fate is to get raped to death, on Pallas of all places. His eyes roll closed.

He’d given everything he had to leave this spice running life behind. His good little ship, named for Yavin’s pole star, a quiet prayer to carry him home. He hears the high note of her protesting engines, his blood singing in his ears, as he turns her nose to the water. She falls like a stone. Wrecked at the bottom of the ocean, her hold full of spice that will never do anyone harm. A sacrifice to fate, so maybe the Resistance would have him. 

Hood’s hand closes on his neck again. Poe makes an incoherent noise that is part way to a scream. “What do you want?” he cries out. “Am I doing this wrong? Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it. Just – don’t do that again. Please.” 

Hood’s hand slides up from his throat and takes hold of him across the face. “I want you to look at me.”

“Is that fucking all?” Poe lets his head fall back. Meets Hood’s eyes and holds them. “You could have just said,” he mutters, weakly. 

So, he keeps his eyes open, and if they are not fully focused, they are at least pointed in the right direction. That seems to do for Hood, who gets to work, grunting away with his face screwed up, droplets of sweat coming off him. As pretzeled up and painful as he is, Poe feels like he could fall asleep. Like there is nothing left in him at all, not even the spark that fires his consciousness. He drifts, eyes open, into a parallel universe where he found the words in time to say, _Hey, let’s not go to Pallas, guys. I got really fucked over there once._

At long last, Hood breathes out hard through his teeth, and his rhythm starts to stutter, fast then slow. He plants himself deep like a flagpole, and his whole body twists. He lets Poe’s legs drop down, and falls forward. 

“Ow,” Poe says, as Hood’s cock pulls clear of him. He is a wet mess down there. Hood lies across his chest while he catches his breath. There’s a lot of sweat between them, the smell of it sharp and stale, and somewhere beyond that, the scent of blood. Poe wonders what comes next, but it’s an abstract thought. He feels numbness; nothing else. The crushing weight of saltwater. Everything he has to give, a sacrifice for a slim hope. He finally closes his eyes. 


	4. Chapter 4

Poe keeps his eyes closed for as long as he can. Even starts to dose a little, before he is brought back to himself by a sharp slap to his thigh. Hood is sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him. Poe swallows a few times, meaning to speak, but nothing comes out.

Hood reaches and unhooks Poe’s cuffs from the head of the bed. 

“Sit up,” he says. Poe does so, carefully and painfully. He uses his hands, which are still cuffed together, to cover up his private parts. A futile gesture, given he no longer has any parts which are private from Hood, but it makes him feel better, so he’ll take it.

“I’ll say this for you,” Hood says. “You are fun to fuck. Remember the last time?”

Poe does, though he has spent years trying hard not to. On his hands and knees on Hood’s bed, while his wife watched and laughed. At least that time it was over quickly. Hood seems to be waiting for him to answer, and when Poe says nothing, he snorts with false amusement and reaches to ruffle Poe’s hair. Poe leans away from his touch and raises an incredulous eyebrow. 

Hood’s eyes harden. They are locked eye to eye for a moment. Poe knows he is inviting retaliation, but he won’t drop his gaze. He has found, briefly at least, the spark that keeps him fighting. Hasn’t he faced worse than this? He thinks of his friends, waiting for him on the Falcon, and finds strength in the thought instead of shame. 

It passes completely unspoken, but perhaps Hood feels the change in him. At any rate, Hood breaks his gaze first, and bends to root around in his canvas bag. Poe can see the set in his jaw. _You just brought trouble for yourself. But hey, what else is new?_

Hood pulls a strip of black fabric out of his bag, and ties it around Poe’s eyes. No more stare-offs any time soon, then. At first, Poe can still see cracks of light by the side of his nose, but then Hood adjusts it, and he is in darkness. The fabric is elasticated, and fits snugly. Poe raises his hands to his face, but Hood blocks him.

“Keep your hands down or I’ll tie them down,” he says. Poe returns his hands to his lap. Not being obedient, he tells himself. Just keeping his options open. He might need his hands later. He feels the bed frame creak as Hood stands up. The faint scuff of his feet on the rock floor. Poe sits alone, and listens hard. He is sure he is being watched; that Hood is staring at him, eyes crawling like ants all over his body. His skin creeps and prickles at the touch of air.

A beat of silence, then he hears Hood shuffling and scuffling a few feet to his left. It disorientates him, because he’d thought Hood was right in front of him. Without meaning to, he lifts his hands to his blindfold. Something collides hard with the side of his head, making him reel, his cheek smarting. 

“Seriously?” Poe says. He recovers himself and replaces his hands in his lap, covering the front of his body as best as he can. It wasn’t a hand that hit him, but he isn’t sure what it was. He hears a slosh of liquid, like a bottle being shaken. 

“Are you thirsty?” Hood asks. “Want some water?”

Poe does. It is hot and dry in this hole in the ground, he’s been sweating and screaming, and his mouth still has a jizz taste stuck in the back. Still, he doesn’t answer straight away. He doesn’t want to ask Hood for anything, or take anything that isn’t forced. But dehydration isn’t going to help him any. He thinks, out of nowhere, of Leia, who can cool his temper with simply a look, and no hard feelings. He nods, slowly. 

He hears the slosh of liquid again, then Hood puts a hand on his chin, and tilts his head back. The rim of a bottle touches his lips. He tastes water on his tongue, and swallows it down. Keeps swallowing and swallowing, as Hood tips up the bottle and lets it pour a little too fast. A fair amount of it ends up down his front before they are done. Hood takes the bottle away, and wipes his chin and chest with what feels like a rough towel. 

“Good boy,” Hood says.

“Go fuck yourself with a lightsaber,” Poe says. He means it as a biting retort, but his words come out a little slurry. The darkness is disorienting him. He goes to raise his hands to his blindfold again, and then drops them back in his lap. 

“Good,” Hood says. He takes hold of Poe by the chin again, and Poe feels lips press against his own, a tongue trying to intrude into his mouth. He makes a small disgusted noise and jerks back, but Hood has his lip between his teeth, and Poe has to twist to get free. Doing so makes him dizzy. For a moment, he feels almost in freefall. Hood holds him with one hand cupping his jaw and the other on the back of his neck, and gives him a little shake. 

“Come on,” he says.

“This is worse than sucking your dick,” Poe tells him, but he cracks his mouth open to do it, and that’s all Hood needs to get his tongue inside. Poe resists the urge to bite, and keeps as still as he can, doing nothing that could be construed as kissing back. With all his senses pulled towards it, his mouth feels cavernous. Like the centre of the earth, set with white rocks, his tongue some living creature lying carefully inert. He can taste blood, or molten rock, and suddenly he feels far too hot. He opens his mouth to let some heat out, but there seems no limit on the hinge of his jaw; it falls away from him, even as Hood relents and releases his head.

“What –” Poe says. His heart is racing. His chest feels tight, but he is losing track of the rest of his body. “Did you just –” Talking is an effort. The words seem to be rolling out of him, echoing into an expanding room. “What the fuck was in that water?” he manages to say. It takes him an entire ice age. Hood laughs. The sound seems to circle him, coming at him from all angles at once.

“I thought you needed to relax a bit,” Hood says. “Don’t tell me you’ve never sampled your own product.”

“No,” Poe says. “I never have.” Or he thinks he says it. He’s suddenly not sure of the truth of anything around him. If Hood means him to relax, it hasn’t worked. He jumps and flinches at nothing. No sound, no touch. His muscles just tighten and jerk of their own accord. A few seconds later, it hits him again, like a hiccup. His head and body are spinning, like he’s doing a barrel roll in the cockpit of his X-wing. 

Poe lifts his hands to his blindfold again, because he can’t deal with this in the dark. Hood catches hold of him, his fingers digging into Poe’s arm, far too deep, sinking into his skin like butter. His forearms stink of blood. A charnel house smell that fills his nose and throat. He thinks of the Battle of Crait, and the wake of their skimmers turning the salt plains red. Shuts his eyes behind his blindfold, and his vision turns red. He can taste the taint of redness. He slumps sideways. Lands against Hood, who holds him, half across his lap. Poe’s whole body jerks. 

“Wow, you weren’t kidding about this being your first time,” Hood says. He rests a hand on the top of Poe’s head and makes soothing sounds. The worst thing is, it works. Helps Poe to make sense of where he is in the room. _No barrel rolls,_ he tells himself. _Nothing is red that’s not supposed to be._

“No barrel rolls,” Hood agrees, and Poe jerks again in horror at the sensation that Hood has just reached into his head and plucked his thoughts out. 

“Please don’t do that,” he says. Or thinks he says. The problem is, the words sound one way in his head, and another when he says them out loud. He is suddenly highly, hyper-aware that he is naked. Like, not just naked, but _naked_. Vividly naked. Hood is naked too. Their skin is sticking together. Elbows and knees awkward in their unequal embrace.

“Are you done freaking out?” Hood asks him. Poe shakes his head. He’s really not.

“Hey,” he says. “Hey. Could you maybe take the blindfold off?” Maybe he can get a handle on himself if he can recover just one of his senses. 

“Relax,” Hood soothes him. “This part is meant to be fun.” 

He lies back across the bed, and pulls Poe with him, lifting him under the armpits until Poe is lying face-up across his chest. He can feel Hood’s cock again, trapped between their bodies, hot and hard against his lower back. Most of his weight is held by Hood’s body. He is sinking in quicksand with the heat and texture of flesh. His body jerks.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Hood breathes in his ear. Poe lifts his hands to his face, hardly knowing what he means to do. That he ever had the gift of sight seems to escape him. This darkness is so whole and total that it must have been with him since birth. Hood takes hold of Poe’s cock, gripping the shaft and wrapping his fingers round the base of his balls. Root and stem. Poe’s body betrays him with another jerk, a miserable, spasming hiccup that makes Hood’s hand tighten. 

“No,” Poe says. He knows he says it once. He might say it a thousand times. Hood starts to stroke him. It hurts dully at first, like Hood has his fingers in an old wound, but then the pain purifies to something clear and perfect like a star that burns at the core of him. His blood is thrumming. Screaming. Changing note, like an X-wing banking in atmosphere. Those terrible, beautiful moments when he isn’t quite out of control.

“Don’t. Please,” Poe says. He doesn’t mean to. One hit of spice has melted whatever filter used to exist between his thoughts and the outside world. His cock is getting hard. He comes to this knowledge with a groan. Hood keeps taking from him, double handfuls of everything he has, is, and has to offer. He feels a loss as keen as grief. His body jerks in futile protest. 

“It’s okay,” Hood soothes him, even as he tugs on his hardening flesh, pulling at Poe’s insides like some pecking carrion bird. Poe tastes red in his mouth again. The blood plains of Crait. Everyone dead, the bodies stacking up, and it’s all his fault. He thought this into being, paid a butcher’s price for it. He is nothing but bones.

“Good boy,” Hood croons. It curls him up. Makes him disappear inside himself. Leia tells him that. Not the _boy_ part, but when he does well, she says _Good_. Like the word has weight, and she and he alone know what it means. 

“No,” he says. He is throbbing. Achingly hard, his hips rocking, lifting in rhythm with Hood’s hand. Hood is pulling him too hard, squeezing him tender and raw. Shame sits heavy on him like a stone, but a jagged, ragged euphoria rages inside him. His muscles jerk.

Hood squeezes and pulls, rubbing the head of Poe’s cock roughly with his thumb. He says, “You’re doing so good.” Poe comes in jerks and spurts, as though the words themselves have dragged it out of him. He is drowning in it, a tidal crash of breaking waves, shore and safety lost from sight. He groans out his last breath. Hood’s fist is slick around his cock, and still keeps squeezing, gripping him painfully tight, jerking at him like he’s trying to work the crank of an engine.

Poe croaks out in pain, even as his hips shudder with aftershocks. Hood seems to be trying to yank his cock clean off, working his hand into a rhythm of fury. His arm, clamped around Poe’s waist, has tightened too. 

“Did you like that?” Hood hisses in Poe’s ear. “You drug-running piece of shit, do you like it when I make you come?” 

Poe barks out a laugh which hurts his throat. He feels sick. He wants nothing more out of life, aspires to nothing, not even escape. Hood sits up, shoving Poe off himself, and hauls him onto the floor with a handful of hair. Poe rolls half under the bed, and Hood pulls him out by his handcuffs, breaking open the wounds on his wrists. The blood smell fills Poe’s nostrils. He reaches once again to pull at his blindfold, and Hood kicks him hard in the ribs. Rolls him onto his back, and stamps on his stomach. 

Poe folds himself up, spluttering and sore, and does his best to make himself small. Hood moves away for a moment, and he lies in the dark, his ears straining for danger. He hears sounds, and it is some seconds before he realises most of them are coming from himself. He is moaning and wheezing. His throat feels like sandpaper. 

Hood tugs at his hair until Poe pulls himself to his knees. He presses a hand over Poe’s mouth, pushing something into it. Poe bites down on something that fits between his teeth and tastes like rubber. Hood straps it tightly round his head, and then ties another strip of fabric over Poe’s mouth, closing it firmly to the outside world. 

A gag over a gag. Between that and the state of his throat, Poe wonders exactly how loud he has been. If he’s been screaming or babbling secrets. He has, suddenly, the feeling he has been saying a name, Finn’s name, like the word itself has some power to save him. He hums into the gag to see what noise he can still make. Hood slaps him hard on the cheek. 

“Take a hint,” he says. Poe does. Or he tries to. But he was already short of breath, and now he is reduced to breathing through his nose. He jerks again, another whole-body muscle spasm, which stays with him, making him shake. He drags in as much air as he can muster in short hard snorts. Hood’s fist connects with his face and sends him sprawling.

Poe lands awkwardly and starts scrabbling desperately at the gag with his hands. He cannot get purchase on it, or on the blindfold. They are both bound too tight. Hood kicks him hard in the ribs again, and he scrabbles harder. 

“You never fucking learn.” Hood drops his weight onto Poe’s back and sits across him. Pins him squirming on his front with his arms stretched out. He pushes Poe’s face towards the floor. “Hold still.” 

Poe groans. He snorts blood and snot from his nostrils, and manages to turn his head sideways so his nose isn’t squashed. His body spasms again, twisting him up. He pants uselessly against the gag. Forces himself to breathe through his nose, and to keep on breathing, fighting his own clenched core muscles. He forces himself to go limp. 

“Better.” Hood lies across him. His cock presses against the curve of Poe’s ass, sliding into the cleft of his buttocks. Hood dry-humps him a few times, grinding hard. His face falls against Poe’s neck, huffing hot against him. 

“Hold still,” he says again, right in Poe’s ear. He lifts his hips and slides a hand between them. The head of his cock nudges at Poe’s asshole. There’s already a slippery mess of spunk and lube back there, and Poe’s body gives way with barely a fight. Hood’s cock slides inside him, sharp and stretching at the entrance, and a dull bruising pressure deep inside. Poe’s body tries to push back, but Hood thrusts through it. He fucks Poe in short, angry bursts. Collapses, panting, his weight on Poe’s back, his cock deeply buried. Catches his breath and then thrusts again, grunting slurs.

Poe plays dead. Lies still, limp, and silent, except for the muscle jerks, which hit him every minute or so like a miserable jolt of electricity. Hood whispers in his ear, horrible threats and curses that carry the weight of truth. That Poe did this to himself. That this is a fair price for the misery wrought by each shipment of spice. That he _wanted_ to get fucked, which isn’t true, but hadn’t he been cruising for a crash of some kind, all those years on Zorii’s crew? Even when he ditched his ship, nose down in Candor’s sea, it was down to the roll of the dice whether he would sink and die with it. 

Leia tried to teach him this. To stop throwing himself away. He doesn’t know how she forgave him; he led people to their deaths on that same dice roll. And he never fucking learns. Hood batters at him, pounding like he’s grinding spice. They are sweating together, skin on skin, the jizz that Hood tore out of him drying on Poe’s stomach. All of this which should have been offered freely to someone he loves. He feels so robbed. All his muscles wrench, a spasm racking through him. 

Hood pounds himself to a standstill and finishes, collapsing on Poe’s back. Pulls out his cock with a dull drag of pain. Moves away, panting, leaving Poe to himself for a minute or two. Poe doesn’t move. Doesn’t even shift himself to ease his aching limbs. Are they even close to done? He has lived out the span of his days, aged and died down here, but who knows how many hours have actually passed. 

Hood pulls him up to his knees. Poe comes up heavily, like a sack of rocks. He cannot seem to take his own weight, so Hood holds Poe against his body, pressing Poe’s cheek against his thigh. Pets him on the top of his head. 

“You know our deal?” Hood says. “I want to say fuck our deal. I could keep you as a pet. Make you sit up and beg. Would you like that?” 

Poe shakes his head, minutely. He can’t stop saying no, no matter how useless it is. But when Hood strokes his face, he doesn’t resist. Even leans into Hood a little deeper. He can’t handle the weight of himself, and some part of him is desperate for comfort, no matter where it comes from. 

“Do you need to piss?” Hood asks him. As he soon as he says it, Poe realises that he does, and quite badly. He weighs up the options of resistance, but it’s a fight that he’s already lost. He nods his head. 

Hood pulls him up to his feet, and leans Poe’s body back against himself. He wraps his arms around Poe’s waist and walks behind him. It is a long walk through the dark, Poe’s bare feet scuffing on the stones on the floor. The spice is still doing its work, making his head reel, and by the time they get across the room, he’s ready to throw up. 

Hood takes Poe’s cock in his hand. “Go ahead,” he says. Poe does not. Not through defiance, but because it is a literal fucking impossibility for him to piss while another man holds his cock. It simply doesn’t work that way. Especially when he can’t see where he’s aiming. He makes a noise into his gag to try to convey this. Hood tweaks his penis, and gives it a shake. 

“C’mon,” he says, his tone encouraging. To Poe’s horror, his body complies. His bladder relaxes, and he pisses out a stream. He hears the sound of liquid hitting metal in a discordant off-key chime. It reminds him of something, but he’s too busy groaning in humiliation which becomes relief. He really did need to go, and holding it in has been adding to the general fucking mess down there. 

When he is done, Hood steps away from him and lets him fall. Poe rolls away from the rising stench of urine, and brings his knees up close to his chest. Hood lets him be. Lets him lie there alone and listen to the dark. Poe tries to pretend that it’s a relief. That he doesn’t, somehow, feel more lost, more empty, than when Hood held him in his arms. 

He remembers with a start. Jumps half out of his skin, hard enough to trigger another spasm in his muscles. His whole body tightens like a clenched fist. His mother’s ring. The guard took it from him, and threw in a bucket that stood against the wall. The same bucket where, judging from the sound, he has just deposited a stream of piss. 

Every hot and cold moment of shame he has ever felt in his life comes rising up to meet him like a slapping wave. He spasms again, his throat closing up, but this is not like the tremors of before. He is racked with sobs which cannot escape. They turn inward and tear him from the inside. The rock floor beneath him reels away, and he falls through the vastness of space, impaled by the pin-pricks of every passing star. 


	5. Chapter 5

Poe spends the rest of the night in freefall. Aware only sometimes of his body, abandoned on the floor. Of more intrusions. The blindfold stays on, but the gag comes off, and there’s a dick in his mouth again. And at one point, a finger, which he bites, the blood-taste spilling like paint across his teeth and tongue. Hood kicks him hard in the balls and bangs his head on the ground. There’s a blank after that, and when Poe comes back, there are voices in the room, echoing off the rock walls, and he’s not sure if he’s dreaming, until one of them holds him down and fucks him. He knows it isn’t Hood; the hands feel different. The _dick_ feels different. 

At some point, Hood pours water down Poe’s throat again, then pins him to the floor while the second hit of spice kicks in. It’s enough to make him see through his blindfold, hands reaching from the walls, grabbing him all over, unzipping his skin and sliding inside. Hands inside his ribcage, gripping on his pulsing heart. His blood runs like a river, washing his bones away, until he is nothing but a stain on the rock, but one that is, somehow, still screaming. 

“Bad night, huh?” Hood asks him, some time later. “You know, spice is like fucking. It hurts a lot more if you fight.”

Poe responds by retching up an unpleasant mix of water, blood, and whatever he ate yesterday, which probably passes for a retort.

In the dark, time becomes spacetime. The night passes in disorienting lightspeed jumps. Poe’s consciousness curves like a gravity well, pulling in the matter which makes up his body. Hood starts pulling his body around, jerking him this way and that. This seems to be part of a process of putting his clothes back on. Poe’s feet are pushed back into the legs of his pants. Hood lifts him to pull his pants back up over his butt, then drops him like a sack of rocks. He unlinks Poe’s wire cuffs from each other and forces his arms, one at a time, through his shirt sleeves, keeping each free arm carefully pinned. This done, he links the cuffs back together and gives them a little tug.

 _Like I’m going to cause trouble if he leaves my hands free._ Right now, Poe’s threat level feels roughly equivalent to a crawlfish that’s been three days dead. His muscles are still seizing him, hitting him like a shock, like he’s shivering from cold even as the fabric of his blindfold turns moist with sweat. 

Hood moves away, and Poe hears a heavy metallic clunk and the sound of liquid spilling. The echoes in the room come at him strangely, like the walls have expanded and warped. He’s pretty sure it’s just the two of them now, and wants to doubt there ever was a second man. Reality has been throwing curveballs at him all night, and he has a vague idea Hood was doing stuff to him during the worst of his trip, which might account for how his ass hurts.

It’s stupid that it matters, really. And way too late to start nitpicking about consent, but even so, this was supposed to be between the two of them, not an open season invitation for any faceless voice passing by. 

Hood’s feet scrape back towards him. He pulls Poe roughly to his knees.

“Know what this is?” Hood presses an object against Poe’s cheek. He knows it; a cold loop of metal, still on its chain, the links of which pucker his skin. His mother’s ring. Still wet.

“This your girlfriend’s? Boyfriend’s? Mom’s?” Hood presses it harder, hard enough to leave an imprint on Poe’s skin. Poe says nothing. Maybe with a small spark of defiance, but mostly because his head is swimming so much his mouth might as well be underwater.

“Tell me,” Hood says, giving his cheek a little backhanded pat. “Or you can’t have it back.”

“It’s no one’s,” Poe says. “I stole it.”

“Really?” Hood sounds amused. He presses a finger against Poe’s teeth, past them, and touches his tongue. “Bite me this time, and you’re not going to walk for a week.” 

Walking feels like something Poe used to do in a past life. His legs feel like chewed up leather. A muscle spasm hits him, and he fights to hold his jaw open so his teeth don’t clamp shut of their own accord. Hood slides a second finger in, then forces them both to the back of Poe’s throat. Poe gags against the pressure. Hood pulls his fingers back.

“Tell me,” he says, but before Poe can even organise his thoughts, Hood clamps a hand over his mouth and pinches his nose painfully shut. Poe tries to jerk away, and tastes blood running down the back of his throat. Hood lets go, and lets him pant for a moment, before he says again, “Tell me.”

“My mom’s,” Poe says, as shortly as he can. He wants to spit as soon as he says it, to deny he has spoken of her at all in Hood’s presence. He does not want her here. 

“Good,” Hood says. “See? It’s not so hard. You’ve had a rough ride tonight, but that’s your own fault. If you hadn’t been an asshole every time you had the chance, we could have got along.”

“I really doubt that,” Poe says. The words have peaks and troughs, and he trips through them. Hood’s hand moves to his mouth again. Pushes something past his lips. Poe tastes it, metallic, on his tongue. His mother’s ring. Hood tucks it, chain and all, behind Poe’s teeth. He presses a strip of fabric across Poe’s mouth, pulls it tight, and knots it behind his head.

“About our deal,” Hood says, when he is done. “And all your bitching and moaning and biting. I’m not feeling good about it right now. How about you?” 

Hood pauses, as though waiting for reply, but the gag seems to have done more than just shut Poe’s mouth. He is struggling to process speech, like his brain has decided that words are no longer his problem. He occupies himself instead with tucking the ring underneath his tongue, safe from where he could swallow it. 

Hood touches his face again. Sketching an arc that starts on Poe’s cheek and follows the line of his jaw. “Are you listening?” he says. Pokes and taps with his fingers. Says it again. Poe’s weight slides forward. Hood catches him by the shoulders, and pulls him close.

“Are you listening?” he says again, right in Poe’s ear. Poe makes a sound into his gag which seems to pass for an answer. Hood nods, and cradles him close, his hand on the back of Poe’s head.

“I’ve had fun tonight,” he whispers. “Haven’t you?” He shakes Poe until he makes a sound again. “I know, I know,” he soothes. “You’ll remember me, won’t you? What we had together. You’ll miss me. No one else will understand.”

Hood’s words are faint, like conversation coming from another room, but some sense of them gets through to Poe, like the last shaft of light before a door slams. He tries to twist away with the last of his fading strength, but Hood only pulls him closer, soothing and tender, as though Poe is pressing against him in an act of love. 

“You’re going to think of me, spice runner. No matter where you run to. No matter who you fuck. You’ll never find anyone else. I’ll live in your head. It’ll always be me.”

* * *

The next thing Poe is aware of is a bite in the flesh of his wrists. Someone is pulling at his cuffs. Blood runs down his forearms, fresh and warm. His mouth is full of spit, and he gargles behind his gag. Turns his head, and his consciousness spills out of him like a bottle that’s been knocked on its side. 

Time skips, and he wakes up again in the shuddering dark. He is on his back, and the chain on his ring has fallen to the back of his throat. It scratches, and his chest heaves with a cough that can’t escape. He can see light through his blindfold. He is somewhere brighter than his cell. The ground is moving, juddering and grinding, vibrating through his bones. The light flickers, or he does.

Time skips. 

He is grabbed and lifted. Finds himself in freefall for a brief, dizzy second, then lands hard on his shoulders. The surface is slanted. He slips, scrambling with his fingers at the ground. His hands are sticky with half-dried blood. He hears voices, raised all around him, over his head. A feral bellow-roar which curdles his insides. He tries to tuck up, to cover himself. Hands take hold of him, unfold him, roll him on his back. 

“Poe? Poe? Help me with him.” Someone is close to him, looming over him. Poe can feel the warmth, the scent, the disruption of air. He braces his bound hands against their body and tries to push away. To no effect. Hands slide under his shoulders, and he is half-dragged, half-lifted. Fingers fumble at his gag and pull it free. Poe’s mouth falls open, and the ring slides out. He gasps with a force that makes his muscles spasm. His whole body twists. 

“Poe. It’s okay. It’s me.” Poe hears the echo of Hood’s last words. _It’ll always be me._ He flinches at the thought. But he does know that voice. Doesn’t want to name it, in case he is dreaming. In case he isn’t dreaming. His blindfold is pulled free, but he keeps his eyes closed. The push of light against his lids is painful. 

“Poe? Can you hear me? Talk to me, buddy.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell where he’s hurt. Poe? We have to get out of here. Get home. Get help.”

A low, melodious roar that carries the sense of words. A sequence of beeps which rise in pitch. Footsteps clatter, ring on the metal floor, and recede away. 

“Poe? C’mon, pal. You’re with me, I know you are. Let’s see some life.” A hand taps lightly on his cheek. Poe flinches and blinks. Light gets in. Colours and sounds blur into one, then separate themselves. The rumble of the Falcon taking off. He’d know it anywhere. The sonorous kick of the overdrive sounds like nothing else. 

“Hey,” Finn says. “Hey. Good to see you.” He sounds a little breathless. Poe’s head is resting in his lap. BB-8 rolls up to him, into him, butting against his body, asking what has happened and if he’s okay, question overlapping question in a stream of beeps. Poe blinks at him. Reaches and presses his fingers against BB-8’s body unit. 

“Hey, buddy,” he says, in a bare whisper.

“You can talk to the droid but not to me?” Finn says, so Poe has to look at him. Finn smiles, a tired, strained smile that nonetheless lights up his face. 

“You’re good,” he says. “All good. Just hold still a minute. I’ve got to get these things off you.” He gestures at Poe’s wrists. Poe looks at where he points. His fingers have left a smear of blood on BB-8’s casing. 

“Oh,” he says. He realises he can feel his pulse in the wounds, thumping sickly. The Falcon rattles around him. He is cold. His feet are bare.

“I lost my boots,” he tells Finn. Finn doesn’t answer. His face is screwed up over Poe’s cuffs. He cuts them apart, but they don’t come loose. Finn has to pluck at the strands which are stuck in Poe’s skin. He seems to feel it more than Poe does, hissing and wincing as he works. Poe tries to hold still, but any physical effort on his part, even effort not to move, seems to trigger another spasm. This time, it’s his abdominal muscles which contract, pulling him into himself like his body is retreating to the womb. The clench of his muscles shuts off his breathing, and when they release, he falls back panting, shuddering with aftershocks. 

“Okay,” says Finn, once it passes. “Okay. We’re nearly done. Just – ow – this last bit. Ow.” He pulls the final wire free, with a few ragged strands of flesh still attached. BB-8 whistles in sympathy and distress. 

“Thanks,” Poe croaks, at both of them. 

“Any time.” Finn lets Poe’s arms drop. He is staring closely at Poe’s body, and starts to explore with his hands, running them over Poe’s ribcage. He tickles and makes Poe’s muscles twitch.

“Don’t,” Poe tells him. His heart rate picks up a notch. He pushes Finn’s hands away. “No.” 

“It’s okay. It’s just me,” Finn tells him, but that’s not the problem. Poe’s skin feels like sparks are coming off it. His jaw clenches and he has to work to push words out.

“I know,” he says. “Just… don’t. I’m okay.” 

“You are clearly not okay,” Finn says, but he stops touching. Poe feels smothered all the same, and rolls away so his head is out of Finn’s lap. He tucks himself up with his arms folded, and one knee pulled up towards his chest. 

“I need to check if you’re hurt,” Finn says to the back of his head. 

“I’m not,” Poe says. Even as he says it, his muscles spasm again, twisting him up in a whole-body grimace. He groans in pain. Rolls onto his knees, and uses his elbows to push himself up. He needs to escape. From what, or to where, he can’t say, but he absolutely cannot stay passive and still for a second longer.

Finn hovers next to him, hands outstretched, not touching. “Poe, for crying out loud. Work with me here.” 

Poe waves him off. He gets up as far as his knees. His head is spinning fit to hurl, and he can’t work out which muscles he needs to engage to stand up from here. Instead, he plants his hands against the floor and starts to crawl. It hurts like hell on his wrists, and he pitches forwards. Lands on his face, then grimly picks himself up again. 

“Yeah, you can cut that out.” Finn’s hands slide under his shoulders. “Come on.” Poe tries to shrug him off, but stops when he discovers Finn is not trying to push him down, but help him up. Between them, and with some considerable effort, they get Poe into a seat. He slumps against the dejarik table. It helps, to be sitting up and not having people loom over him. He still can’t let Finn touch his body, but he mostly endures an effort to clean up his wrists. The wounds there are an assortment of criss-cross marks, some shallow, some deep. Finn wipes the worst of the blood off, but the deepest cuts don’t bear touching.

“Poe, what the hell happened?” Finn asks him, once he is done. Poe has been starting to drift. He jerks his head up at the question. 

“Um,” he says, then shuts his mouth. He never did get around to deciding what he’d say. “I guess I got arrested.” 

“Yeah, no shit. But they let you go?”

“Yeah, we… kind of made a deal. Turns out he was a Resistance sympathiser. Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

Poe gestures vaguely at himself. “Kind of.” 

Finn frowns. Poe closes his fingers to fists, waiting for the next question. An idea strikes him, and he tenses the muscles in his calves too. Sucks in his gut, trying to do it so Finn doesn’t see. The tension builds like a wave in his body, surging beyond his control. He gasps as the spasm hits him, seizing him from head to toe. It keeps on building, way past the point of regret, and by the time it breaks, sweat is standing on his forehead. He slumps back in his seat and raises his hands to his face. 

“Fuck,” he says. Finn does not ask another question, but sits for a moment, shoulder to shoulder with him. Poe drops his head and closes his eyes. He is exhausted beyond words, and feels keenly that he has just done a shitty thing, to Finn as well as himself. 

“Sorry,” he says, softly.

“What for?” Finn asks, but Poe doesn’t answer. Keeps his eyes shut. Feels a spark of anger, that it is not enough that he has had to give his body away; he must now face this. Questions which will pick him apart, piece by piece. To choose to lie or tell the truth, and either way lose something. He wishes, after all, that he had gone down with his ship, and was even now asleep in Candor’s dead sea. 

He drifts. A salt tide which tastes of blood. Half aware of his surroundings still. That the Falcon has jumped to hyperspace; an octave higher in the pitch of its engines. That Finn has moved. Rey and Chewie are back in the room. Their voices are waves which rise and fall. Someone slides into the seat next to him, and takes him by the forearm. A smaller hand than Finn’s.

“Poe.” It is Rey. She speaks softly. Says his name a few times before he comes all the way back. “Hello,” she says, when he opens his eyes. He blinks at her slowly, wanting more time in the dark. She keeps her hand on his forearm for a moment, then gently slides down until her fingers ghost over his wounds. The lightest of touches, barely a tickle, but it makes his muscles tense up and his hands jerk.

“It’s okay,” she says. Something starts to tug at his skin. The touch is not just on him, it is _in_ him, working deep into his wounds. He has felt it before, this pulling without hands. Kylo Ren did this to him. This inside-out touch, tearing at his mind, taking from him. Poe’s vision doubles. For a moment, he cannot say where he is, or when he is, or if he ever did escape that other hellish room. 

“Get off me,” Poe snaps. The strength of his voice makes them both jump. He scoots away from Rey, sideways along the seat, his hands thrown up to ward her off. He runs out of seat, and falls without grace, landing hard on his back on the floor.

“Whoa, whoa. Poe.” Finn reaches him first. Poe has landed mostly under the dejarik table, which gives him a corner to fight. He scoots himself further under, kicks at Finn, and tries to swing his fists. Yells with all his might at both of them, at everyone, to back off, get off, leave him alone, to keep their hands off him, unloading like a coiled spring with everything he’s been holding in for the last twelve hours. He shouts himself hoarse, kicks at anything that comes in reach. Kicks the table, kicks the floor, threatens and thrashes at no one. Pushes with his hands at the empty air which crowds too close. 

“So, that was a bad idea,” Finn says.

Rey crouches, carefully beyond Poe’s flailing distance. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” she says. “It’s Force healing. I can fix your wrists.” 

“I don’t want to be Force healed. I don’t want to be Force anything. Just… Force off.” 

Another spasm shakes him to his bones. Poe drags a hand across his face and groans aloud. A footstep scrapes towards him. “No,” he snarls. The footstep stops. He curls himself up in the corner, covering the vulnerable parts of his body as best as he can. Holds himself vigilant, heart loud in his ears. Waits for the next fight. But the room is silent, except for BB-8’s disconsolate beeps. The droid edges into his field of vision, moving in fits and starts, unsure of his welcome. 

BB-8, his good little droid, who Poe pours his heart out to in the cockpit sometimes. The one place he is truly himself, and so cannot be weakened by confession. He feels desolate at the thought. Untouchable, by anyone, ever again. Friendless, after he has thrown all his punches. After he has told all his lies, as he knows he will lie, in the days to come. Hood was right; no one will understand, when he only has words to tell them. This is worse than words. 

Poe reaches out his hand, and BB-8 rolls into range. The droid is cooler to touch than a human, but still carries the warmth of life. He burrs and whirs. Poe presses his palm against his curves. Sleeps like that, when his strength runs out. BB-8 beeps a binary comfort. He will not let anyone close. 


	6. Chapter 6

Poe comes awake to the sound of birds, clattering and calling in the trees. Drifting on the edge of sleep, the sound takes years off him. Whisper-birds in the massassi trees, and his mother calling, always awake before him, up with the sun.

He tries to hold the thought, keeping his eyes closed, long after he knows this is not Yavin 4. That these are not those birds, not those trees, and his mother is long gone into the ground of that other moon. He is home, though; of a kind. He opens his eyes, and finds himself lying on a bed in the makeshift med-tent on Ajan Kloss. The wind breathes against the tent walls, and medical equipment whirs and beeps softly. Someone hoves into his vision. He flinches and closes a fist, before the shape resolves itself into Doctor Kalonia.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” she says. “And the land of people who are not stoned out of their gourd. How are you feeling?” 

Poe relaxes his fist, with some effort. Performs a quick mental inventory of his body. He feels numb, mostly. He works his jaw, swallows, and grunts, which seems to be all the answer Kalonia needs. 

“Good,” she says. “No, don’t move. You have an IV in.”

As soon as she says it, Poe feels a pressing need to move a lot, but he can’t seem to rally his body to oblige. He shifts his weight. Grimaces as she leans over him to check on some piece of equipment across the bed. Opens his mouth, but words fail him. 

“It’s okay,” Kalonia tells him. “You don’t have to talk to me. You don’t have to do anything right now. Just rest.” 

Her tone is the worst. Soft, sympathetic, and enough to tell Poe that she knows exactly what has happened to him. That he has been examined in intimate detail while he was out. Treatment administered, his clothes changed, the worst of the goop and grime cleaned off him. Blood rises to his face, and a lump to his throat. He looks away from her. She touches him lightly on the shoulder, and moves away. Kills a light somewhere, and leaves him in the half-dark. He listens to the birds, trying again to drift back to a time before all this. But these are not his birds. 

* * *

He does not sleep again. He lies on the bed with his chest hollow. He can’t get his head out of the cave, replaying the events of the night over and over, while adrenaline thuds, dull and without purpose, through his veins. The problem is, his version of events keeps shifting. He thinks he has things straight, then discovers some new ache or bruise on his body that he can’t account for. Doubt spills over everything then, truth and delusion pooling together.

 _Does it matter? Does it really matter now? It’s done._ But he is unconvincing even to himself. It feels like the worst insult done to his body that he can’t even say, in the cold light of day, how many times he got fucked, or by who. 

Not that he actually would say. The next time Kalonia comes near him, he gives her a dirty look. He is furious. Helplessly, ridiculously furious, that she has touched him and looked at him and handled him, all while he was trapped in sleep. 

“Mind your IV,” is all she says. Mildly. Matter-of-factly. Like she doesn’t hold this power over him; this power of knowing just exactly what flavour of rough his night has been. He wants to know who she’s told. If she’s told. Who she might tell. 

“Hey,” he says, then stops, shutting his teeth together with an audible snap. He can’t think of a way to ask which won’t lead to a conversation he never wants to have. His heart is thumping, loud and fast. He scratches his arm. Finds the IV under his fingers, and yanks it out. 

“You’re going to need that,” she tells him. “It has the painkillers in.” 

“I don’t care,” Poe says. It’s the first proper sentence he’s spoken since he woke up, and it comes out a little too loud. Kalonia sighs at his scowl. 

“I know you feel bad right now. You’re tired, dehydrated, and coming down off a spice high. You’re going to feel better. It’ll happen faster if you let me help.” 

Her reasonableness has a draining effect. Poe slumps back on the bed. “This is bullshit,” he says, but vaguely, and to the roof. 

“I know,” she says. “Do you want something to help you sleep?”

Poe shakes his head. The thought of being out again gives him the creeping horrors. Some jangling, animal part of his brain feels her words as a threat – behave, or get sent back down to the helpless dark, to be touched in a place where he can’t even scream. He holds miserably still while she puts his IV back in. 

“I’ll be right here,” she says. “Try to rest.”

He cannot rest. His skin feels alive, like ants are crawling on it. He wonders what Kalonia saw, when she undressed him. Finger mark bruises on his hips and thighs. The mess of blood and lube and semen that she must have wiped off him. Fury rises like a flame in his chest. This flame has dogged him all his life; the source of his rashest words, his stupidest decisions, but the very same thing that keeps him fighting. He needs it now. His anger is the fragile thread that keeps him from falling apart. 

* * *

“Hey,” Finn says. “You look like hell.”

“Hey,” Poe says, rousing himself from a slump to a half-sit. Finn seems to have bounced in out of nowhere. And it’s good to see him, really good, a rush of positive emotion that sits so badly with Poe’s dark ruminations that it gives him indigestion. 

“The doc says you’re being a terrible patient,” Finn says.

“She said that?”

“Not exactly. I read between the lines. You’re not meant to have visitors, but she’s sick of you griping and thought I might cheer you up. She didn’t say that either. But, lines.” 

“Sounds about right,” Poe says. He feels chastened. Finn is smiling at him. A lot. A bit too much, actually. “What?”

“I’m pleased to see you, you jerk. You weren’t exactly with it, last time we spoke. You kicked me. Several times.”

“Oh,” Poe says. He frowns, thinking back. “Sorry.”

“It’s cool. I didn’t know what was wrong with you. The doc says you were high as a kite.”

“Yeah,” Poe says. Carefully, to cover the stab of panic in his chest. If Kalonia has been talking to Finn, what else has she told him? He watches Finn closely, plays back his tone of voice in his mind, but nothing seems amiss. 

“I have something of yours.” Finn goes fishing in his pocket. Pulls out Poe’s ring, holds it up by the chain, then lets it drop into Poe’s open palm. Poe looks at it for a long second. Thinks of Hood’s fingers, pushing it past his teeth. The taste of it on his tongue.

“Thanks,” he says, and closes his hand so he doesn’t have to see it anymore. He brings his closed fist to his face, and rests his knuckles against his mouth. 

“Are you okay?” Finn says, after a pause. 

“Yeah,” Poe says. “Yeah. Just… still feel kind of woolly. And I’m really tired. Sorry. If I’m being weird.”

“Weirder than normal?” Finn says. Still teasing, but his tone is gentle. Poe smiles thinly and grits his back teeth. Gentleness is hard to bear. 

“Weirder than normal,” he echoes, his voice carefully bland. 

“Poe,” Finn begins. Then seems to change his mind, and stops. Poe looks at him sideways. Raises an eyebrow. His eyes are hard, and Finn looks taken aback. He presses on in a rush of words. “I just… I still don’t get what happened. They drugged you?”

“Yeah, Finn. They drugged me. I didn’t take this shit for fun.”

“Whoa. I know. Look. Poe. You blurted out some vague bullshit to us, then got marched off to who knows where. We were worried sick. We waited all night. Then they drop you back, out the blue, and you’re bleeding and beat up, and tied up with that wire stuff – which I had to dig out of you, by the way – and you’re having these, like, fits. I don’t even know what. And freaking out at us like you didn’t know who we were. Except you did know. That was the worst. You scared the shit out of me, man. I have a right to ask you, don’t I?”

Poe shakes his head. Slumps back on his pillow. Closes his eyes. The problem with picking fights is that he doesn’t have the strength to sustain them. That, and he’s picking them with all the wrong people. Finn doesn’t deserve this. Doesn’t deserve _him_ , and the mess he has made. 

“Sorry,” Poe says. He gestures in front of his face to try and find the words. “Sorry. Look, Finn. I have had a really shitty night. I promise you, whatever you were going through waiting for me, I was getting it back tenfold. Can’t we just leave it at that?”

“No. Poe, you’re not hearing me. I’m not telling you this because I want to get even. I want to help you. You’re there for me, I’m here for you. That’s how this works. Isn’t it?”

“Right. So maybe you can trust me, and let this drop. It’s better this way.”

“Really? It doesn’t seem like it’s better. I don’t feel better. Do you?”

“Yeah, Finn, I feel fucking amazing.” Poe all but shouts in Finn’s face. “Thank you for the visit. You’ve really helped.” 

Silence. The two of them glance guiltily around, half sure their rising voices will bring Kalonia, or half the camp, running. But they remain alone. Poe shakes his head. Squeezes his fist so hard around his mother’s ring that it hurts.

“Listen,” he says. “Can you do me a favour? Could you look after this for a little while?” He thrusts the ring towards Finn and presses it into his hand. Finn turns it over in his palm, then looks at Poe.

“This is your mom’s,” he says, with a question in his voice. 

“Yeah. Would you mind?”

“Sure. Of course.” Finn holds his gaze a moment, then shakes his head. “I don’t get you sometimes.” 

“Don’t lose it. Please.” Poe can’t help saying. Can’t help watching, tracking with his eyes, as Finn tucks it back in his pocket. His voice has a crack in it. He covers his face with his empty hands. Hears Finn shift, then sigh.

“Okay,” Finn says. “Sorry. Now is not the time. Of course I won’t lose it. You need to rest. I’ll come back. But I am coming back. I don’t care how much you yell at me. I’m not leaving you like this.”

“Thanks,” Poe says, from behind his hands. “Thank you.” 

Finn presses two fingers to the top of Poe’s shoulder, and leaves. The touch lingers, leaving an echo on Poe’s skin. He wishes Finn had lingered with it. He lets his thoughts dwell on it. Becomes fascinated by it, this ghost of a touch. By the fact he didn’t mind it, when the very thought of being touched still makes him feel like a feral animal, knowing only how to fight and claw.

When Kalonia comes back, he feels better able to swallow the urge to act like a miserable jerk. Hesitates when she asks him again if he wants help to sleep. He does want to sleep. He is so tired he is thinking through soup, and has nothing to gain from being trapped in the loop of his own thoughts. But he is scared he might dream. Scared of the dark, of being held down. He feels like a mask has been peeled off him; that he is exposed to the world. That what lies behind his fury, now and always, is only this: he is afraid. 

He decides no. Wants to thank her for giving him the choice when she could have, in easy conscience, just knocked him out without asking. But mask off, he doesn’t trust himself to speak. He hunkers down on the bed and thinks about ghost touches. The painful impression left by the ring no longer in his fist. Finn’s fingers, lifting him up, not holding him down. 

* * *

Kalonia, it turns out, hasn’t told anyone. 

“What do you take me for?” she says, when he finally finds the words to ask.

“You told everyone I was stoned.”

“Anyone who saw you couldn’t have missed that. And besides, people were worried about you. You can’t expect me to tell them nothing at all.” 

“Ugh,” Poe says. “People.” One of the downsides of starting to feel better is he no longer has an excuse to keep visitors away. He’s gotten pretty good at faking being himself, flipping over to some autopilot part of his brain that can nod and smile and say the right things, and lie like it’s his job to. 

“Ugh,” Kalonia mimics. “While we’re on the subject – please don’t roll your eyes at me, Commander Dameron. While we’re on the subject, have you given any more thought to our earlier conversation?”

“I already told you,” Poe says. “No.” 

In fairness to the doctor, he gets now why she took advantage of his being unconscious. She wants to examine him again, to make sure the bacta treatment she applied to his ass is doing its job. As far as Poe is concerned, it’s an absolute no. He has never fully appreciated before what a powerful word _No_ is, or the giddy thrill of getting it to say it in a place and manner where it actually gets heard. 

“Tell me, do you enjoy being difficult?” she asks him, sweetly.

“I really really do.” 

She sighs. “Okay. Poe. Some real talk. I know how hard this is for you. Believe me, I do. I did not tell anyone because it’s up to you who knows. What I’m not going to do is help you pretend it never happened, because it did, and you’re going to have to address that, sooner or later. You might find it helps to talk.” 

“What’s to talk about?” Poe says. “It happened. Good talk.”

“Then consider this,” she says. “You’re not flying again without my say-so, and I can ground you on psych grounds just as well as medical.”

“That is low,” Poe says. “And you wouldn’t do it. We’re short on pilots as it is. The Resistance needs me in the air.”

“The Resistance needs you whole and healthy and at your best.” 

Poe presses fingers to his temples. “You don’t understand.” His tongue feels tied. He drums his fist on the bed in frustration. “It’s not – Look, whatever you think happened. That isn’t what happened. It’s more complicated than that. I don’t enjoy being difficult, okay? I’m not doing it on purpose. Believe it or not, I’m trying quite hard. You’re asking me for something I just can’t do. I can’t do it. You might as well ask me to walk to the sun.” 

“Okay,” she says. “See, now you’re being honest. That’s something, at least.”

“Good talk,” Poe mutters, darkly. 

But it does have some effect, because Kalonia agrees to forgo her examination on the condition that he check himself, and tell her if he finds the slightest hint of infection. That, he can do. And she lets him leave the med-tent and go back to sleeping in his own bed. Which honestly, he thinks is risky. Their camp is small and crowded, and he has frequent urges to just walk off into the jungle and never come back. But he doesn’t. So that’s something too. 

Finn, true to his word, doesn’t leave him. Poe now has down pat a bullshit story about how he skipped out on a smuggling charge on Pallas a few years ago, and had to cut a deal with the local police, sympathetic to reformed Resistance fighters. Exactly how and why the deal involved drugging him senseless and slicing his wrists into cold cuts is a part he glides smoothly over. 

“You know, you are a pretty good liar,” Finn says. His tone is conversational rather than accusing, so Poe can’t find it himself to protest. He just shrugs.

“Well, I used to be a pro.” 

Weirdly, it helps that Finn knows he’s lying. Deception is a heavy weight, and at least he can drop it sometimes. What’s even more weird is that Finn doesn’t really seem to mind. Poe’s lies haven’t broken their friendship. Finn still wants to be around him, still talks to him the same. Is good, in fact, at finding his way around Poe’s newly reset physical boundaries. Poe gets twitchy when people stand too close, and casual touches set his heart racing and leave him feeling sick. But Finn, despite being his most constant companion, is rarely the cause. 

He is healing, but it’s a process that seems to happen in fits and starts. His wrists itch like fire, and sometimes the itch spreads across his skin like licking flames. He scratches himself raw when no one’s watching. He gets muscle tremors too, the fading but persistent ghost of the spasms which racked his body on spice. His hands shake. Sometimes, after eating, he has to slink off into the trees to throw up. 

“Your body is going through withdrawal,” Kalonia tells him.

“I took like one hit,” Poe protests. “Or two, maybe. One night.” 

“It’s powerful stuff,” Kalonia says. “It’ll pass. Just don’t take any more.” 

She means the last part as a joke, so Poe smiles dutifully, but the words plant a worm in his brain. It’s not that he _wants_ to take more. At all. Ever. His first experience was pretty much a technicolour nightmare, after all. But he has this creeping sickness in his stomach and on his skin, and if the spice didn’t make anything hurt less, it at least made everything hurt different. And he could use a little different. 

So, the worm stays with him. Piping up out of nowhere, at odd times of day. He catches himself wondering if anyone on Ajan Kloss has connections. And then remembers that they do, because he does, and that some day soon, he’s going to be allowed to fly again. 

“Finn,” he starts to say once, wanting to say, _Finn, help me. Don’t let me do this. Sit on me if you have to._ But he can’t close that door. It’s a chance of escape. To a terrible ruin, but the worm burrows deep. He holds his tongue, a silent, screaming hostage to himself.

Finn waits for him to finish. “Poe?” he says, at last. 

“I can’t,” Poe tells him. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” He doesn’t know what, even. He gestures, palms open, in front of his face. Pushes at the air. His wrist twinges, and he catches it with his other hand, digging with his nails at the drying wounds.

“Hey,” Finn says. He takes Poe by the forearm, and twists him free of his own grip. Slides his hand down until they are palm to palm, and closes his fingers. “Hey,” he says, again. 

“Finn,” Poe says. “I can’t do this.” He closes his hand on Finn’s, squeezing like a vice until Finn could rightly protest. Instead, he squeezes back. Poe clings like a drowning man. Reality doubles around him. The jungle air of Ajan Kloss tastes like the dark of the cave. He feels stripped to the bone. Nothing but a body, roughly used. “Don’t,” he says. To nothing. No one. “Please.” Pain tears through him, raw and real. He gasps and groans. Scrabbles with his free hand, finds the front of Finn’s shirt and holds on tight.

“I’m here,” Finn tells him. “It’s me.” An arm slides round his shoulders. He knows it is Finn, but the touch is like a brand across his skin. He twists, and tries to push away, even as he clings on. Loses all sense of his orientation, up from down. Finn’s grip is keeping him from falling off the moon. Finn talks in his ear, a litany of words: _it’s okay. I’m here. Come back, Poe. Come back._ He does not sound soothing, but panicked and sad. It hurts to be the cause of that. Poe sucks in a rattling breath. Forces his eyes into focus. He is not in the cave. His body has twisted and slumped, and his face is pressed against Finn’s chest.

“What the fuck,” he pants.

“Breathe,” Finn tells him. “In through your nose, out through your mouth.”

“I know how to breathe.”

“Then get it right.” 

Poe tries to snort a protest, but Finn has a point. Gasping shallow breaths is doing him no good. He focuses. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. 

“Good,” Finn says. Poe grimaces against him. It makes him think of Hood, as does the press of their bodies, the wrap of Finn’s arm. His heart beats too fast. Still, he does not move. Finds an iron core of stubbornness inside himself. Hood doesn’t get to take this from him. Finn’s hand is still folded in his, trapped between their bodies. He focuses on that. A safe touch. Saving him from drowning.

“You’re okay,” Finn says. “It’s okay.” He sounds short of breath himself, like he’s talking for his own sake as much as for Poe’s. 

“It’s okay,” Poe tells him back. “Finn, keep breathing.” 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Thank you to everyone who has read, stayed with, and reacted to this strange little fic. I hope the ending is worth it. Much love and stay safe in this difficult world <3_

“Can I tell you something?” Finn says. They are watching the sun go down on the lake, a short distance away from the buzz of the camp. 

“Sure,” Poe says, recalling his attention from the water. From wondering how deep it goes. Finn frowns and bites his lip. He steeples his hands in front of his face.

“What?” Poe prompts him.

“You know what you are not in a position to do? Rush people.”

“Okay. Sorry.” Poe shuts up and waits. Resists the urge to fidget as the silence draws out. Finn shifts his weight, and stares at the lake.

“Did I kill the moment?” Poe asks.

“Now you did.” Finn shakes his head and laughs. Poe laughs with him. It’s an ability newly returned to him over the last few days, and he’s treating it with care. 

“Okay,” Finn says. “Shut up. I’ll tell you something else instead. I want you to know this. I hope you already know this, but you can be kind of a dumbass, so who knows.”

Poe raises an eyebrow at him. “What?” 

“You’re my hero,” Finn says. “You saved my life the first time we met.”

“Sure, sure.” Poe says. He does know this, though really Finn saved his life far more than the other way round. “I mean, it’s a good thing the thing you needed me to do was fly very fast, because that’s pretty much all I’m good at.”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean before that. When you looked at me like you did, and you told me we were going to do this. I didn’t really believe it until then.”

Poe frowns at the waves. Sunset colours lapping on the rocks along the shore. He half wants to argue, but that wouldn’t be fair on Finn. 

“I believed it then,” Finn says. “I felt it. And I… felt you. You’re so… fierce. You burn so bright. Everything you do, you become it, with all your heart. I knew what freedom felt like. Right then, in that moment.”

Poe nods slowly, to show that he hears. Compliments seem hard to take. He thinks of ghost ships. Fire on the water. Of salt plains streaked with blood. He shuts his eyes. 

After a while, Finn says, “I wish I could do the same for you now. Say one thing, and make everything change. I hate seeing you like this.”

“I hate it too.”

“I know you do. I didn’t mean – I mean, I wasn’t blaming you.” Finn’s voice has an empty note, which tugs at a thread in Poe’s heart. He swallows down the copper taste that’s rising in his throat. Reaches and taps his fingers on Finn’s knee.

“I know what you meant,” he says, then stops. Since Hood got a hold of him, his emotional responses have been rewired to a panic button in his brain. Already his throat feels blocked. He runs a hand through his hair. He can do this for Finn. “Finn, you change things for me every day. I have no idea where I’d be right now if it wasn’t for you. This could be so much worse. I’m sorry, I guess I should have said that sooner. I just can’t seem to get out of my own head right now.”

“It’s cool,” Finn says, but he sounds relieved. He mimics Poe’s gesture, bouncing his fingers lightly off Poe’s knee. “I’m not fishing for compliments here. I just want you to know some stuff. Like… Okay. Don’t laugh. Whenever I get scared, I think of you. I think of what you’d say to me. I think of what you’d do.”

“Wow. You do not ever want to do what I’d do. Bad idea.” 

“I didn’t say I do it. I just think it. I couldn’t do what you do. What you’re prepared to do. What you do without flinching. I’m scared all the time. Of how this war will end. Of losing the people I love. You know, I nearly ran away twice. From Rey. From you. It’s hard to tell you that. I don’t think you’ve ever run from anything in your life.”

“Seriously?” Poe says. “Finn, I’m running all the time. I just… I run in the wrong direction. The stupid direction. I’ve never met a problem I couldn’t make worse.” 

Finn smiles at that. He shuffles closer to Poe, and touches his arm. “I don’t know if I should say this. Maybe it’s not for me to say. But I see this – ” He gestures at the bandages now covering Poe’s wrists. “I see how hard you fought. And I’m proud of you. Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s okay.” Poe is taken aback. There’s something proprietary that comes with pride, but still, Finn shouldn’t need his permission. Poe picks his way back through Finn’s words, feeling that he has missed something. Runs a thumb around the edge of a bandage. They are there to stop him scratching. 

“It’s not like you think,” he says, at last. “I mean, if you’re imagining some heroic struggle. I did the worst of it when I was drugged. I don’t even remember half the night.”

“What about the other half?” Finn says. Poe shakes his head. Expects to stumble on his words, and is surprised to find he can answer quite smoothly.

“Honestly, I don’t know which half was worse. I’d rather not remember. But… I know he did stuff to me while I was out. It kills me that I don’t know what. I don’t even know how to start to deal with that.”

“Who’s ‘he’?”

Poe feels stumped. Hood has lived in his head for days. His ordeal has a face and name, and that Finn doesn’t know it – that no one knows it – feels like a window into the world outside his head. He shuts his back teeth together. The lake looks blood red. The waves lap at the shore, reaching for him. A cold and choking death. He wraps his arms across his chest.

“I should tell you something else,” Finn says. “Poe, I… I do know what happened to you. I’ve known for a while.”

Poe jerks his head up. “Did Kalonia tell you?”

“No. No one told me. I just… I kind of guessed.”

“Does everyone know?”

“No. I don’t think anyone knows. How would they know?”

“How would you know?” Poe tightens his arms across himself. 

“I wasn’t trying to pry.” Finn speaks at speed. Reaches for Poe, but doesn’t touch. “I didn’t mean it. I just… I thought about it, and I guessed. That’s all. I wasn’t going to say, because I thought you’d be mad. But it didn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem fair. You think you’re alone and you’re not. That’s all. I thought it might help.”

Poe cuts him off with a slice of his hand. “It’s okay. I’m not mad. I’m not mad at you. I guess I would have told you. Sooner or later. Or probably not.” He shuts his eyes and speaks to the dark. “It’s good that you know. It’s a good thing. Saves me having to pretend. Tripping over my own tongue every two minutes. But Finn, it’s not like you think. I fucked up. You have no idea how much I fucked up. This is a fuck-up spanning years. It’s actively impressive how much I fucked up. I should win a fucking prize.”

“Breathe, please,” Finn says. But it’s too late. Poe digs in his fingers. Holds himself down. 

“Don’t,” he says, when Finn moves towards him. “I’ve got this.” He forces air out of his lungs with an iron will. Keeps his eyes clenched closed. Bites hard on his cheek and swallows blood. “Ugh,” he says, at last. “I hate this. So much. Kalonia says it’s post-traumatic whatever-the-hell. Honestly, she’s being pretty smug about it.” 

Finn shifts in his seat. Doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He lets Poe breathe for a minute more. “Better?” he says. 

“Better.” Poe carefully loosens his grip on his own forearms. Tries to shrug his shoulders loose. Blinks his eyes at the fading light. The worst of the red has passed. He catches Finn’s eye. Feels suddenly like he hasn’t really seen him for a while. Poe smiles at him, a real smile.

“I must be so boring right now,” he says. “Thanks for staying with me.”

“Any time,” Finn says. “Always.” He shuffles to close the space which has opened between them. Their shoulders touch. Poe can feel the hesitation in him. He shuffles back, bumping against him, to show he doesn’t mind. 

“I really wasn’t meaning to pry in your head,” Finn says. “I couldn’t help it.”

“Yeah, I know.” 

Their knees are touching now. Their forearms lying side by side. Poe watches Finn twitch his fingers. He turns his own hand palm up. Looks, with deliberate study, at the water. Cool and calm. Finn slides his hand into his. Poe smiles to himself. Folds his fingers around it. Finn’s touch is warm.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Finn says. “But if you want to talk, I’ll listen.”

“You want to know how I fucked up.” 

“Look, you said it. Now it’s eating me alive.” 

Poe laughs through his nose. Brushes his thumb across the back of Finn’s hand. “I think you’ll think less of me.”

“Poe,” Finn says. “I used to work for the First Order.”

“Not on purpose. You ran the first chance you had.”

“You were the first chance I had. Try me out.” 

Poe nods. He says nothing for a while, watching the sun make its slow dive into the lake. “I don’t want to tell you his name,” he says, at last. “I don’t want to hear you say it. I don’t want you to think it. I don’t want it out in the world.”

Finn tightens his fingers. Copies Poe’s earlier gesture of brushing with his thumb. 

“I met him in a bar,” Poe says. “Years ago. His wife was there too. It was a thing. I was lonely and bored and on a streak of bad decisions, so I let them pick me up. I mean, that part was actually fine. The morning after, not so much.” He makes an arc in the air his free hand. Doesn’t meet Finn’s eye.

“He knew I was running spice. I mean, I was flying empty. Pallas was never one of my stops. I guess that doesn’t matter much. He wasn’t wrong. About what I did, or who I was. He told me he worked in shipments. He lied. He was a cop. And you don’t want to get arrested on Pallas. They use prison labour in those mines. People don’t get out alive.”

“Huh,” says Finn.

“So. I thought I was screwed. But he offered me a deal. He just… wanted to do some stuff that I’d said no to before, and I was like, ugh, whatever. Beats dying in a mine. And then. Years later. Same moon, same guy. Pretty much the same problem. Except two things. This time, he has you guys to threaten me with too. And I guess he got mad in between. He really wasn’t going to make it easy on me this time.”

He stops. A fish jumps in the water. Circles expand on the surface of the lake. The light is nearly gone. 

“So, yeah. I had a rough night, but it’s not like you think. Honestly, I don’t even get why I feel so bad.” 

“Do you even listen to yourself? Why wouldn’t you feel bad?” 

Poe shakes his head. He has an urge to reclaim his hand. To stand and walk away. He hasn’t explained it right. Can’t explain it right. Does not deserve Finn’s attention, or his careful touch. 

“You don’t get it,” he says. 

“Do you get it?” Finn says. “It seems like you’re not processing what happened here. Poe, that guy raped you. Both times.”

Poe twists his mouth at the word. “Technically,” he says. “I did say yes.” 

“Don’t do that. Don’t give that guy anything. He did that. It’s on him. Not you. You didn’t ask for that.”

Poe shakes his head again. He feels numb. Finn’s words seem to reach him from a distance, as though he’s speaking across the width of the lake. The patterns on the water pull him in. Finn squeezes his hand.

“Are you with me?” he says. “Come on. Hey. You zone out like that, it scares me. Tell me something.”

Poe shrugs. “I guess you’re right,” he says, just for something to say. 

“I am right,” Finn says. “Please keep talking. About anything. I don’t care what.” 

He has that note in his voice again. Poe keeps hearing it from him. He sounds so sad. Poe turns to look at him. At the stricken lines of his face in the growing dark.

“I’m here,” Poe says. Finn puts his free hand on top of their clasped palms. His touch is soft, and weightless somehow, like he’s holding back from putting his whole self into it. Poe has noticed this before, and assumed it was done on his behalf. Finn tiptoeing around him, mindful of his panic buttons. Now he wonders if it’s not about him at all. If Finn is just nervous and unused to touch. 

“I’m here,” he says, again. “I’m not zoned out. I don’t know what to say, is all.” That’s true, at least. He has told Finn the bones of it. The rest, the meat and blood, is his alone. What happened to him, the raw, physical truth of it, can’t be told in words. It is written in his body, in every line of tension, in his core, his fists, his flesh. The sense memory of sweat and screams. Of intimate touches taken from him. Being pinned, held down, impaled, his body giving way. The bitter taste of cum in his mouth. 

He hunches over, his body curling in on itself. “Shit,” he says. He wants his hand back, to cover himself, but Finn holds him tight. There is weight behind his touch now, pressing Poe down to the earth. 

“You are right,” Poe says. “I was so wrong. I was wrong about what he wanted. I thought it was just sex. That I could just take it. How bad could it be, I thought.” He laughs through his nose, a harsh, painful snort. “Everything I did, everything I tried, just to get through it, he… he wouldn’t let me. He didn’t want sex, he wanted _me._ He wanted everything. Anything he could take. And now… now, I can’t get him off me. The feel of him, the smell of him, his hands, his… all of him. He’s all over me. I can’t stop fighting him.”

He shivers, hard. Cold air is coming off the lake, and he can feel it, raw on his skin. He could lose his bearings in the dying light if it wasn’t for Finn, pressed against him, real and warm. The rustle of his clothes, the kick of stones as he shifts his feet. Poe turns to him and their faces bump, nose against cheek. Poe sees Finn’s eyes widen from an inch away. Feels his short, surprised breath. He is torn in two. Finn or not, the closeness of another body sets off sirens in his head. Makes him want to fight, to break like a wave, to batter himself to pieces on the numbing rocks. 

But this is Finn. Warm and real, who wants him safe and well. Who owns a piece of him, by asking to be proud. Poe dares himself with all his pilot’s nerve to hold the touch. Not falling but flying, he tells himself. A crazy, spinning, aerial stunt, part chaos, part perfect control. He does not retreat, but presses his face against Finn’s, feeling the scrape of his stubble on Finn’s soft cheek. His heart pounds. He can’t find his breath. He can find Finn’s lips, and presses his own against them, mouth closed in memory of Hood’s prying tongue. Finn makes a small sound. His hands travel. Touching Poe’s chest, his neck. Finding his face, and resting as light as a bird on the line of Poe’s jaw. 

Poe has to break. He has to breathe. He butts his head into Finn’s shoulder and laughs, the life-giving laugh of surviving a stunt that nearly went horribly wrong. He is holding onto Finn’s shirt, double handfuls of it clenched in his fists. 

“Sorry,” Poe says, when he catches his breath. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“It’s okay,” Finn says. He sounds breathless too. “It’s very okay. At least, I hope it’s okay. I hope you didn’t do that for – well, for not a good reason.”

“Let’s not overthink it,” says Poe. He laughs again, and Finn laughs with him. They lean against each other, fulcrums for each other’s weight. Poe moves for another kiss. He is giddy with adrenaline. He feels electric, like sparks are dancing on his skin. He thinks, unaccountably, of Hood, tipping water into his mouth, forcing him to swallow hard and fast. His heartbeat spikes. He pulls back. Blocks Finn with his forearm when he tries to move with him. 

“Whoa. I’m sorry. I can’t do that again just now. I want to. I can’t.” Poe lets out a short laugh with no humour in it. “I am really fucking broken over here.”

“It’s okay,” Finn says. “And you’re not. You’re just moving too fast. Kind of like always, in fact.”

Poe laughs shortly again, but with a little more warmth. “I do seem to have a problem,” he says. Finn shifts himself until he is sitting shoulder to shoulder with Poe again. He holds out his hand, palm up.

“Want to take a step back?”

Poe nods, and folds his hand into Finn’s. The last shafts of sunlight dance on the face of the lake. He is grateful for Finn’s kindness, but can’t work past his gut-twisting frustration – or the feeling that he doesn’t wholly deserve to be cut a break. He sighs.

“I’m not going to take that kiss back,” he says. “I meant it. Whatever you want me to mean by it, I meant that. But maybe this isn’t such a good idea. I’m the worst mess right now. I can hardly even think straight. I could screw this up in a heartbeat.” 

From the corner of his eye, he sees Finn shift in the dark. His posture slumps, then straightens up. 

“You know what?” Finn says. “No.”

“No?”

“I said take a step back. That’s too many steps. This isn’t something you can just undo. Not for me, and I hope not for you. This is scary as hell for me too. You have no idea. You do not get to ditch me the moment you get cold feet.”

“I’m not ditching you. I’m giving you an out. No, listen to me. Whatever you want from this – from me – I want to give you that. I just don’t know what I can offer you right now, except being an enormous pain in your ass.” 

“You’re already an enormous pain in my ass. I’ve learned to live with it.” 

“Shut up. I just… I don’t want you to be stuck with me, cleaning up my mess. How could that be good for you? And – I’m not kidding when I say I think I’m broken. What if I can’t?”

Finn gives his hand a shake. “You are not broken. I know that you’re not. I know how strong you are. I know it, Poe. You fight back all the time. I can feel it in you. You’re going to win. You never quit. That’s who you are. I’m not stuck with you, I need you. I need what you have.”

Poe opens his mouth to argue, then stops. He frowns at the twilight sky with its first shock of stars. He says, “Finn, I’m being really dense. That thing you wanted to tell me. You’ve been telling me all night. Right?”

Finn twists his mouth. Looks quickly away, then back at Poe. 

“I wanted to tell you before,” Finn says. “I was scared you might tell me to Force off.”

Poe laughs. A sudden, unexpected, real laugh that bursts from his chest. “Wow,” he says. “Really? You can really do all that… like Rey does?”

“Not like Rey. I don’t think anyone’s like Rey. She’s in a class of her own. And I’m really new to this. I’m still learning how it works. You can spend a lifetime learning how it works. But yeah.” Finn looks at him carefully sideways. “I guess I’ve had it all my life. Just feeling stuff sometimes. I didn’t know it was different from anyone else. Not until – well, not until I got out.”

“Wow,” Poe says, again. “That is awesome.”

“Really?”

“What do you mean, really? Of course it’s awesome. Isn’t it? Can you float stuff?”

Finn laughs, and his pose relaxes. He meets Poe’s eyes. “I’m working on it. You really don’t – I mean, it doesn’t bother you? After what Kylo Ren did to you, and the way you reacted to Rey, I thought you might… you know.” He shrugs.

Poe flaps his hand. Waving off Finn’s fears, and the old, cold ghost of Ren’s touch. “You’re not Kylo Ren. And that thing with Rey, that wasn’t really about her. I was just due a freak out. I guess I should apologise to her. I was kind of a dick.”

“I think she gets it.” Finn leans into him sideways. Lets his head drop briefly onto Poe’s shoulder. Butts gently at Poe’s cheek with the crown of his head. He sighs. “It is pretty awesome, I guess. But it feels really big. Like I don’t know if I can live up to it. Like maybe I can’t do what I’m supposed to do with it. Like maybe it’s a mistake that I got it. You know?” 

“If the Force feels like people’s expectations, then yeah, I know how it feels to feel like you can’t live up to that. But Finn, I can’t think of anyone who could live up to it better. This makes so much sense, you know? I always knew you were special. I mean, I can’t do that thing you do, but I knew. Can I be proud of you?”

“You better be.”

“Besides, I don’t think the Force makes mistakes. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. It’s a part of you, right? Whatever you choose to do with it is what you’re supposed to do.”

Finn plants a quick, light kiss on the curve of Poe’s jaw. “You see,” he says. “This is why I need you. We’re doing this. Right?” 

Starlight catches, flickers and shatters on the surface of the lake. Poe feels seasick from emotional gear shifts. Finn is not entirely wrong in accusing him of wanting to cut and run. He wants, suddenly, to quit, just to prove Finn wrong. To prove he’s not all-knowing, despite the Force. It’s a small, cruel impulse, borne from fear, and he swallows it down. Swallows starlight with it. He feels lost in space. 

“I want to,” he tells Finn. “So much. I want to. But right now, even this is freaking me out. Not as bad as before, but I’m freaked out that I might freak out. My heart is going like… here. Feel.” He tilts his chin. Lets Finn touch his pulse. “Any time we try anything. Physical stuff. This is going to keep happening. Over and over, until maybe I can’t take it anymore. Until maybe you can’t. And yeah, I heard you say I’m not broken, but what if I am?” 

Finn’s fingers rest just under the line of his jaw. He does not press hard enough to feel Poe’s pulse. Instead he traces a soft circle, an inch or so in circumference. Withdraws his fingers and sighs. 

“You know,” he says. “I never have.”

“Never have what?”

“Done… that. Physical stuff.”

“Never?”

“Don’t look like that. What chance have I ever had?”

“Of course not. I’m sorry. I… I guess I don’t know what stormtroopers do.”

“I mean, it happens sometimes. But obviously, it’s not allowed. It’s… punishable.” Finn is shadowed against the night sky. When he speaks again, his voice is soft. “There were two I went through infantry training with. I didn’t know, until they came and dragged them away. They shot one, and made the other watch. They let him live. Why wouldn’t they? He was never going to do that again. Not in his life.”

“Finn,” Poe says, stricken. Finn shakes his head, waves a hand, waving his words away. Poe touches his face instead. Finn presses his cheek into the curve of Poe’s palm. 

“When I think about us together, I have to work through that. That… terror. That what we’re doing is wrong, and we’re going to get found out. I know that’s stupid, and it’s not going to happen, and that we’re allowed. But it’s all still there. You ever think I might be broken too? Before I’ve even started.”

“I never thought that,” Poe says. “I’d never think that. It isn’t true. I’m sorry. I’ve been making this all about me. I’ve got like emotional whiplash right now.”

Finn smiles and kisses Poe’s palm. “I’m not trying to one-up you. Just letting you know. You’re not the only one who gets to be weird about stuff. I get my turn too.” 

“Man,” Poe says. “We are going to be the worst.”

“Yeah?”

Poe looks across the lake, across the trees, to the line of the sky. He wonders when he can fly again. Not fly away, just fly. High altitude and out beyond, to the vastness of space, where he can live open-hearted, without fear. 

“Yeah,” he says. “If you still want to try. We’re in the middle of a war, who’s got time to be afraid? I love you, Finn. And I would die stupid, if I never told you that.” 

Finn’s eyes widen and catch the light. Poe holds up his fingers to stop him from saying it back. Saying anything back. “Just… slowly, okay?” Poe says. “I feel like I’m worse than you think at the best of times. And remember that it’s never you. If I can’t. Or don’t want to. Or freak out and kick you.” 

“My expectations are through the floor,” Finn says. “You’re exactly as bad as I think.” 

“I’m serious.”

“Me too.” But Finn is laughing. Laughing like they’ve narrowly escaped with their lives. He presses his lips to the palm of Poe’s hand. Kisses and kisses like he can’t quite stop. Poe has to laugh back. He is dizzy under the open sky, tilting on the axis of the moon. He presses blindly into Finn, pushes and nuzzles with his face. Finn moves with him, against him. He is soft, electric, alive. Poe feels flushed and warm. He is free. He can breathe.

“You see what you did?” Poe says. “You’re stuck with me now.”

It is a revelation, in fact. Like discovering a talent, hidden his whole life. And so unlike the brute grabbing and pushing of Hood that he can hardly link the two in his mind. 

“You know,” Finn says. “I have something of yours.” He delves in his pocket, and pulls out the ring, sliding loose on its chain. He offers it to Poe on his open palm.

“Funny story,” Poe says, as he picks it up. “Before I joined the Resistance… well, you know what I used to do. I was lost. And so desperate to leave that life that I ditched my little freighter in the sea. I went to Leia, and I told her I wanted to fight. I was tired and hurt and furious and soaking wet, and I didn’t know myself, and she looked at me, and she said… she said, ‘I know you. You’re Shara Bey’s son.’ And… it was like she gave something back to me. A map, or a key. I wasn’t fixed. But I could see a way. To find myself. To be who I needed to be.” 

Poe runs the chain through his fingers. Holds the ring up before his eye. He can see stars through it. He drops it back around his neck, and tucks it into his shirt.

“Thank you,” he says.

It sits against his skin as they pass the night, and the stars fade, and the lake wears the welcoming face of the rising dawn. 

  
  



End file.
